


Danse Macabre:

by VladimirHarkonnen (TheLightdancer)



Series: Sex, Death, and Half-Demon Multiversal Sorceresses [3]
Category: DCU (Comics), Teen Titans (Animated Series), Teen Titans (Comics), The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:28:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 75,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25758853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/VladimirHarkonnen
Summary: Three months after the events of 'Everybody's Shouting 'Which side are you on'' the DC multiverse is in turmoil. Space is in flames as the lantern corps ally against the monster Perpetua, called out of ancient aeons and on the rampage.Gods and monsters stalk the world, and a demagogue preaches of a world without death and works signs and wonders proving that she can fulfill her promise.In all of this, Death of the Endless seeks to recover from wounds, to explore love and life, and existence moves along in the Danse Macabre, where all are one in the eyes of Death.
Relationships: Clark Kent/Lois Lane, Death of the Endless/Koriand'r/Raven (DCU), Death of the Endless/Raven (DCU), Diana (Wonder Woman)/Steve Trevor, Dick Grayson/Koriand'r, Garfield Logan/Raven, Hazel MacNamara/Foxglove, Justice League & Teen Titans (DCU), Power Girl & Death of the Endless, Sarah Simms/Victor Stone, Shayera Hol/John Stewart
Series: Sex, Death, and Half-Demon Multiversal Sorceresses [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1754041
Comments: 6





	1. Memories:

WINNICK CAFE, SCHUSTER STREET, JUMP CITY:

If anyone had told Power Girl that she'd become regular confidants and a kind of wary initial kind of mutual therapy transforming into friendship with the literal personification of Death herself, Power Girl would have laughed or hoped that it would have meant she'd go back to her family. Three months ago, Nightwing had introduced her to someone who was seemingly in her late teens, early twenties at the most generous. Had seemed that way until she'd met those eyes and seen that gaze.

Power Girl was familiar with the gaze of someone who'd lived too long and seen too much, for she knew that gaze each time she looked in the mirror, Her public self was one of confidence, belligerence, aggression. The Kryptonite that could hurt her had died with her universe and then with her multiverse to make doubly certain of it. To take time to think meant remembering all the names and faces of her multiverse, of her Earth, of her family, and that she would never, ever see them again. So she had not done that, she had made a name for herself as something of a reckless fool, but it was more than that.

And then she'd met her, Death. Or as she insisted on calling herself, DiDi, for some obscure reason. Death had spoken to her then and it had not taken long before they held each other in a hug and let the tears flow and from there....

From there there was Death, who lived in Titans Tower and now made something of a living as a model, at points. She had made close friendship with a woman who was a near dead-ringer for her from Utah, the woman at first thinking they were identical twin sisters, but Death making bones about this merely being a superficial resemblance and finding the whole thing great fun. She also made a living at various other odd jobs, finding herself strangely skilled at them. She could have, if she chose, relied on the kind of kindness her presence had a habit of inducing in others but there seemed no point to this when the task she had was to recover.

Death had a free day that day and they were at the cafe, poring over the Daily Planet. Among the smaller headlines was an article about DiDi herself, the 'model who was the biggest story since Kori Anders'. The bigger one concerned the news of a great war in space with some great monstrosity with a skull that was both crown and skull fighting the entirety not merely of the Green Lantern Corps but all the others as well. Death looked very awkwardly at that headline and never quite let herself focus on it, though Power Girl didn't really care. Not her circus or her monkeys.

She felt sad at one level that of all beings the incarnation of Death understood what it meant to outlive....everything....but the nature of that loss, the way it underscored the oddity and the cruelty of continued life, it was something both understood and which had helped them to.....

That thought was in her mind as Death looked at a story about a writer who was beginning a new comics series, about the personifications of various concepts. Called _The Sandman,_ it reflected old legends and mystical lore, perhaps emphasized by the presence of DiDi herself.

A sad sigh echoed from her and Karen reached over to put her hand on her wrist.

"It happens. Believe it or not, there's this whole concept called Real Person Fanfiction. Evidently because my whole thing as the last of my universe is a known quantity I'm a surprisingly popular subject."

Her eyes and Death's went beneath her chest and she laughed

"Surprisingly not for this."

"Nah. People like writing fanfics where they imagine angst in a way that shows they have no idea what it's like."

Death raised an eyebrow.

"You should see it too, DiDi. Believe it or not but there's a whole genre connected to you."

DiDi snorted.

_**Please, who'd want to write about me?** _

"You kidding? In a world where Vandal Savage, among others, proves that immortals exist? A new model who shows signs of immortality and has a beauty that could launch a thousand ships?"

DiDi snorted again.

_**Maybe I will check it out, how bad could it be, right?** _

Karen laughed. "See? There you go."

Then someone changed the TV and a voice spoke with a strange resonance, almost like an echo that was in an unnaturally pure harmony to be produced by physical elements alone.

**_The world that we know it has seen the collapse of death, not merely for those who wear the bright and gaudy outfits of the so-called superheroes, but those who are mere mortals, weak and fallible. In a world where a being that seems a man can move planets with his hands and light stars with his eyes and fly in the vacuum of space, what is a man? What is the worth of a baseline individual of any species who has no power to defy physics on smaller or larger scales?_ **

Then she saw a body brought to her, within a grave-shroud and raised the shroud. Others gagged. it was a corpse, one of the few who died.

**_This is the reality that the masses face, a world of some death that still endures, and mars the world. Behold, children of Men, the power that is mine, to end Death and her reign of horror!_ **

Light that had a strange gleam to it extended from her fingers and the dead body found its decay unmade, flesh, muscles, and organ systems regenerating, and then took a wrenching breath.

_**I am come unto the Earth to light a fire of hope!** _

As the dead body rose, Death stared very intently at the paper while others groaned in disgust.

"Damn con artists. Bad enough that Brother Blood did this, now we're expected to take some metahuman with a God complex making our existential nightmare a good thing."

The man who said this was a scarred, somewhat portly man who was looking at an empty mug of beer like he had no idea how it had gotten that way.

"I say that Azar bitch needs to shut her fucking mouth before promising people hope. We've already seen something of what a deathless world would look like. Imagine that but worse!"

Most people agreed but others disagreed, vocally, and an argument erupted in the cafe.

Death was not too worried about the demagogue. The ability to resurrect a body? It meant nothing, people died and rose, but in the end she would outlive the universe and they would all come to her. If anything it meant the rarity of seeing others again, a small pleasure against all the lacks thereof.

All the same the timbre of the voice had a strange and horrid ring of familiarity about it, one that she hoped beyond hope had no truth to it.

After that, for a time there was silence and then Karen and DiDi finished their talk and shared the hugs that made Death's day, before Karen walked off (and in a burst of super-speed simply changed to Power Girl and flew off). DiDi walked down the street and waited near the university campus. Raven was now starting her college career, in premed, as she'd decided, after a long process of careful consideration, to finish her earlier degree from her first body (and in a world where her function made her reality seem cheaper than it was this was much easier than it sounded) and to begin the process to become a doctor, to help others in a way that she had never thought would be truly hers.

Raven, no.....Rachel Roth, left campus, her backpack heavy but in her deceptively small and superficially weak-seeming frame's grip light as a feather. She had on a T-shirt and leggings, not bothering to hide the purple of her hair or her eyes. Rachel Roth was Raven, everyone knew it. None cared, because Raven, uniquely among superheroes, had never really tried to hide or have a secret identity, because what was the point, in her eyes, of trying to hide that which would out anyway.

 _Hey, DiDi!_ She smiled.

Death slid her hand into Raven's neatly.

_**Had a good time talking to Karen while waiting.** _

_Good. You need friends besides just....the gang. So do I._

Death's grin was that infectious one that helped explain why even when they feared her only a few shunned her embrace for a time.

**_That among many reasons is why I love you._ **

_Ah, you're just saying that because you like my ass._

Death looked at her impishly.

_**Well, that too.** _

Rachel stuck her tongue out at her and DiDi snorted.

They could have flown, given that Raven had no secret identity and that her dating DiDi was known but they just walked from the university to the waterfront.

The traces of the clash between the Archangels and the Aesir were still there, at points. The dramatic rift in architecture captured in jagged lines, the newness of the asphalt and the wood on the wharf. They didn't say much, because they didn't need to. Death still found the novelty of people knowing the fullness of who she was and what she was accepting her to be strange. Still found the idea of having Raven and Starfire with her as strange, and the off again-on again pattern with Raven. Death was not exclusive and had no understanding of why or how mortals could make that work at one level while understanding all too easily that in a lifespan of decades it was far easier than one that spanned multiple universes, and not merely in the sense of the shifts in the 'lower' elements of the universe. Those merely changed and rearranged details, no more and no less.

They reached the Wharf and then Raven effortlessly picked up Death, holding her bridal style and smirked, taking off with an exultant shout. In the months since the incident with the Morningstar and the Demiurgos and since her ascension to rulership of the Malebolge, she no longer had to repress her emotions. It was as much a novelty to her as simply living like this was to Death. Physical desires need have no emotions in them, nor did slaking them. There Death had more experience, if in a familial sense, and it was in that sense that her eyes stared at Raven with a mixture of love and wonder, only a slight trace of continued worry about the reality behind the feather that remained in the Wards.

The rest had been taken down, and Death had chosen, voluntarily, to replace them with two long locks of her hair, which had regrown its full length only recently (in her modeling she used her trick of people seeing what they preferred to see to hide the uneven strands).

That one remained behind the wards, the thing that meant that Raven held a sword over her head. Starfire had the sword too, and the alien princess was by no means averse to using it in the bedroom, though not much outside it.

They landed on the island, Death giving Raven a deep kiss, heedless of who, if anyone, was watching, as Raven calmly placed her on her feet.

She whistled as she walked in, hand in hand, having no need of her umbrella or scythe as a cane, and relishing that sign of her recovery at levels beyond the rest.

Starfire was busy snuggling Dick on the couch, and Dick was melting into her nuzzling him beneath the chin, but not enough to not say-

"Oh, Raven, Death, you two have a sparring session later this evening. I know you're not doing the superhero thing but as long as that goddamn feather is in our tower, you're a security risk and I don't want you to lose sight of mundane fighting skills."

Death nodded, a derisory snort from her mouth. Anyone who could take down Raven and take the feather through Raven's wards was not going to be stopped because she knew how to grapple someone, but there was no arguing with Richard Grayson on some things.

Then the thought of Raven in her exercise outfit occurred to her and the snort was replaced by a flush that made Raven in turn snort and lightly flick her on the ear.

_Naughty._

**_You like me that way_**.

_True._

Another day, and another lovely moment in the life that Death had made for herself on Earth-48.

That night, holding Raven, Death let herself sleep, something she had seldom truly had before coming here. It was a blessing beyond words, and each time she did it, she felt part of her strength and of her very being seeming to change for the better. Her body was flushed still with the aftermath of the pleasures, and even if she spent much time in her unloved sibling's realm.....she snuggled more tightly into Raven. It wasn't a bad thing, sometimes. Pity that desire had such a nasty piece of work associated with it and a greater pity that this was her own blood-kin. Of course another blessing of being with Raven was that she was far from the only one whose attitude to her kin was 'that fucking piece of shit' on a good day and much worse on a bad one.


	2. Mr. Black comes to Jump City:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Surtr, King of Muspelheim, has found his way to Jump City, and decides out of genuine curiosity to sit back and watch when the Titans confront Gorilla Grodd, who's come to Jump City to pick on what he thinks are a conveniently easy group of targets. 
> 
> Themyscira is altered to his presence and to its meaning, and decides to take more direct action. 
> 
> Death meets old friends.

JUMP CITY, OUTSKIRTS:

Surtr, King of Muspelheim, now in a human form that wore a very dark three piece suit with fringes of red that seemed more mystical than real, and had skin that was likewise dark as knight brushed off his suit. He had found an annoyingly high number of police officers that had tried to harass him seemingly for the crime of walking around with very dark skin in a three piece suit and had merrily enjoyed calling upon a small taste of his true nature. Melt the guns in their hands and do so in a fashion that rendered the ammunition useless as an extra 'fuck you' to the laws of physics, and it was amazing how many of those people scampered away.

In Central City, a pair of so-called supervillains had sought to rob him and the self-proclaimed Captain Cold and Boomerang had been routed when he simply materialized his scabbard into existence and drew his blade and melted a significant portion of the neighborhood in Central City and turned it into lava. By the time they returned and the Flash fully grasped the nature of just what had happened and how, he was long gone, and none believed that a man with long red hair and skin inhumanly dark could raise a blade of flame and that the blade would do _that._ A few less mature individuals (including the Flash himself) made giggles about the concept of a flaming blade at first and then a look at the consequences of raising it silenced that.

That had been 200 miles of walking ago. Now he was here, on the northern edge of San Francisco, in the city that in other timelines was Oakland, and in this world was Jump City. Surtr, who had taken to dubbing himself 'Mr Black' out of a simple lack of concern for a fancier alias, was unimpressed. All these Midgardian cities blurred into each other. Towering artificial mountains of steel and glass, vast throngs of mortals that outpaced anything imagined by the old days and the old pantheons. And now inhabited by new figures of splendid and even monstrous power, like the children of Krypton, and all other marvels of the modern age.

Idly deciding to amuse himself after so long of merely striding at a speed that no true human could match, he sprung upward and found himself able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, scanning the city. He knew where _she_ was, and she seemed to be making no effort to truly change or heal or do anything to set reality back in order. He understood taking time to recuperate from a harsh encounter with mortality and the seeming existential end of all things. But this? If the little Endless didn't get herself in order first, he'd find a means to move the demon that commanded her and make things set themselves to rights.

Odin and the other Aesir might have spent months in waiting, but they would not wait forever.

When noise of a tremendous clash echoed far beneath him, he reverted his course in mid-leap and casually wielded a small taste of his powers to land not with the tremendous impact his speed dictated he should have (and in a clash with the Aesir would have done so for both the aesthetics and the intimidation factor) but with a soft landing.

A group of these self-proclaimed superheroes were fighting a surprisingly formidable foe, and to Surtr's own surprise, the foe was......

His jaw dropped.

**A gorilla? Really? That entire team fighting a fucking monkey? Now this I have to see.**

Making a point to sit himself at a cafe that had been abandoned an hour earlier when Grodd had made his grand debut and turned the customers on the Titans, his figure stood out when the Titans continued their clash with Gorilla Grodd, and neither of them at first noticed his presence.

\--------

"And I thought Mallah was bad," gasped Changeling as he ran as a cheetah from a car hurled by Grodd's telekinesis. Grodd heard that and bellowed in an audible roar:

**Don't you dare compare me to that damned dirty ape!**

**I am a King, and a lord of Kings, Mallah is a little fa-**

Starfire casually shot him in the back with a star-bolt and shouted:

"Language!" As Grodd snarled.

 **Girl, I've done much worse than use old terms to refer to men who get it on with other men**. He then sought to wield his telepathy to punish her for the audacity, and the successful audacity at that, to shoot him in the back, a move worthy of villains but not of heroes as they usually defined them when the telepathy encountered a very powerful and potent wall that was shaped like an ankh. It was his first time to encounter such power and Grodd, having no clear indication of this save a strangely familiar pulse of energy that reminded him of a couple of years ago when he'd tried to kill and eat Lex Luthor and annoyingly had failed. The push intensified and then it recoiled on him with such force that it hurled him visibly down without anything actually landing a punch.

He shook his head. What the fuck was that? For a moment he was dizzy and saw three of everything, then two. Then the metal man launched himself at him with blows of one fist and a gleaming sonic cannon and he sprang back into action, shoulder-checking the metal man and backhanding him away, his telekinesis erupting outward in a blast that staggered the team.

**Your little demoness, where is she?**

_I'm right here,_ he heard her voice speaking and felt a sudden sense of coldness and warmth, both of which were extraordinarily distinct and powerful, and turned to see her. Clad in the dress she had taken to wearing instead of a more combat-suited outfit, he snarled in pleasure.

 **Your mind is weak, child. And yet your power is strong. I shall command you now.** With that his arms reached out and his power with it and he sought to repeat the same battering ram he'd used to successfully take down the annoying human in the black outfit with the blue bird on his chest. And then he froze. That same barrier was there but astronomically stronger. An ankh of brilliant silver and a cold element around it, redolent with the stench of decay and the grave. Grodd snarled, and then it dawned on him that there was something very familiar with this, after all. After the incident with Luthor he'd seen of all things a woman clad in black with a black parasol and a silver ankh, for a moment, and had moved on until he'd read about her and found out that Death had made in his view a remarkably poor and selfish choice, all things considered.

 **You've been touched by her like Luthor, then,** growled Grodd in a low and menacing tone. **She should never have spared him, but she did. And she protects you and the slave. The slave at least has the aesthetics of being beautiful across species boundaries and a worthy concubine for any that can master her. You? The gutter trash spawned by the self-proclaimed Terrible?**

Grodd lunged at her only for Raven to raise one of her hands and speak a single powerful incantation in three words as a portal opened and Grodd howled as he was sucked down into it, and roared in still greater frustration to realize that he was in Belle Reeve, hands locked in Nth Metal. Raven smiled. There were times where it worked out very well indeed that she shared with Starfire both the heart and the body of Death of the Endless, and the immunity to telepathic and mind control shenanigans was very much that. Even if it made Mad Mod merely annoying and not dangerous, and Mumbo more laughable than he really was.

Looking around, Raven made a low whistle. She'd spent that time evacuating civilians so Grodd couldn't turn more people against the Titans and removing his control over the ones he had transformed into the howling semi-animalistic creatures that had hurled themselves at them, and as necessary as that was, lest the raving mob turn upon others and do even more damage than he did.....she kind of wished that her new...enhancements...included more direct ones.

It was her who was the first to witness the surprisingly sarcastic clapping of the nearly nine foot tall and massively built figure with skin the color of obsidian and eyes that seemed to glow like coals, who wore a stylish suit that made Two-Face seem a rank poseur, and who froze. That man was not there at the start of this and he gave off indications of both tremendous magical power and of metahuman, if human was in truth an applicable word, power as well. It reminded her of the power that Odin and his companions had given off, after a fashion, but wilder. The kind of power that could destroy worlds if unleashed in full.

The rest of the team began the process of doing at least some of the repairs of Grodd's mess as she teleported over to the cafe, where the gigantic figure looked at her with a lopsided grin that was surprisingly human on so inhuman a face.

_Who are you?_

**Call me Black, Koenig Black.**

_Okay_..... Raven looked around.

_Sir, we thought we'd evacuated all civilians around here._

You did, the figure said, steepling his hands.

_So if you're not a civilian, what exactly are you?_

**To you, right now** , the figure spoke in words that were now less tectonic and more things that demanded reality orient within the orbit of the speaker, **I am but a curious visitor going to and fro in the Earth and up and down in it. I wished to see the one who captured the heart of her who had her little....experience...with my niece.**

_Huh?_

Mr. Black smiled and it was less lopsided and more disturbingly akin to the Joker.

**Your little girlfriend the Endless. Her first love, thanks to her little brother-sister, was my own kin. It ended, you might say, in Despair. I have no love for her, and still less for the Endless that did those things to her. The last time she got involved with and in love with another, it ended in that person's annihilation, and you might say, transformation. I was curious and am curious for a variety of reasons.**

He stood up.

**For now, i am not a threat to you or to your team, and I see why she was drawn to you and what did so. If her simpering sister-brother makes his appearance, my kindred learned from the fate of their younger sister that the Endless cannot be slain, exactly.**

The figure smiled coldly. Then again, if you believe the returned Goddess from beyond the Source Wall, perhaps they can be.

Raven blinked. _If that's referring to the self-proclaimed Azar....._

Mr. Black laughed, low and slow and deep. **I met her in the old days, when your little girlfriend had just retaken her sigil, and she was being dammed out of this reality. I know her words. Be cautious, daughter of Trigon. She is entirely sincere in the promise of banishing Death and rendering this entire set of universes Deathless.**

As he formed a sphere of fire and began to vanish into it and Raven froze as flashes of Slade Wilson vanishing in slightly less gaudy elements of fire holding her spellbound, Mr. Black's words echoed: **Azar and her siblings and her father have done that in countless worlds, Death has died, but never absent being glutted until it begs for no more. Denial did not work for your dear girlfriend, and that nearly brought Existence itself into ruin. Do not think that your own could not have dire consequences, daughter of Trigon!**

His laugh was a single sharp bark and then he vanished, Raven staring still and shaking her head and briefly falling to her knees to drive away the bad memories and the flashback.

Then, noticing just how alone she was, she growled at a different level and teleported back to Titans Tower.

\--------------

A FEW HOURS EARLIER AND THIRTY MILES AWAY:

Death was relaxing in a cafe and reading a book that Raven had recommended to her.

The Dreamlands Cycles, a set of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Dream had never been over-fond of Lovecraft's works, for a variety of reasons, very few of which were the more noble ones that the humans of this era would have expected, or hoped. She could not un-see with Randolph Carter the image of a very tall and pallid man and even gave him a moppy head of dark hair and a nostalgic and bittersweet smile leavened with her own tears made reading this slow and laborious, and yet enjoyable. The previous day had seen another active set of modeling shoots, something that left her surprised at how naturally the seemingly sweet Starfire had adjusted to that life.

She had tried to assert her strength and her function progressively more as the effects of her near-self-destruction ebbed, but the process had been slow. More people were starting to die, some of those in hospitals who had lived too long and in too hellish a condition had seen her appear, and welcomed her with a desperate relief and an embrace that left her stunned. Even those people tended to ask if they could not have had more time, or recovered. Instead, they welcomed her, and she appeared to them as a figure with a kindly smile and soft words, and as she held them her wings flapped with eyes that glowed and closed in honor of each soul, as it had been.

One half of her function was returning, if slowly, and with each further case reality set a little more in as it could be, and she could feel the skeins of fate seemingly closing more firmly, if not entirely on a sound foundation yet.

The other......

She turned her gaze to the news, where she saw the ecstatic reporting that the first births from humans and animals and other lifeforms that had been caught in her misery and her growing weakness in three years had occurred. Not many, but some. She had gone there, too, in the delivery rooms and breathed in the breath of life, a thing that always took the sting out of the function for which even her siblings defined her. Her clipped wing still hurt, and it still slowed her, and she could not do as much as she had done before (meaning that the boundaries of life and death were more porous and the metaphysical realms were still in turmoil that was beyond the power of their inhabitants to fully wield or control).

Her life was moving more fully and in the right directions, if still far too slow for her liking. Raven and Starfire had taken her with them on patrols and she'd even been forced into a fight when a tall and burly man in powered armor had seen her and sought to hurl her to the ground to do a deed to her and had simply phased through her as Raven spoke a word and she'd found herself releasing the part of her that served as her 'Earth Three' counterpart, the Horsewoman of the Apocalypse who would ride the Pale Horse.

From the waif-ish teenage-seeming girl to a towering giant with a face that differed mainly in having a constellation for eyes and a cold and terrible smile, and that 'Adonis' , who insulted the Hellene by that name she'd taken long ago, found himself hurled against a wall and then facing a remorseless and implacable force with unknown nature, and in a few seconds later Raven had spoken a second word and she'd been her normal self, Adonis's armor shattered and with it the better part of a building, Adonis himself unconscious and her hand still in the position that had held and broken his armor, but empty.

She had stared at her hand, not knowing what had happened or how, past the point that the man in armor had been over her, and shuddered, her voice coming out in a set of stacatto stuttering.

That memory still troubled her, or more precisely the lack of memory. She had heard the start of syllables from Raven and then heard the end of others and there was a lapse in her memory that she did not know. She trusted Raven, but even if she didn't, she really wouldn't have had the choice but to do otherwise.

She put her book down and then stiffened further when she heard familiar voices, and her eyes turned. She saw an older woman, though she had been just at the edge of 18, along with Hazel, when they'd last met. At 42, Foxglove Kavanaugh still had her long hair, even with streaks of grey, and Hazel's hair was dark. Hazel looked younger and part of Death twinged with a quiet wonder and worry if Hazel's confession of love, at the time when she had both needed and wanted to hear this, and when she was already partial to women as it was, had led her to do something without intending to do it. Foxglove looked her age, Hazel looked like she hadn't aged a day.

Their son was now a tall and strapping young Black man, clean-shaven, with a light build, wearing a shirt with Barack Obama's face on it. The memories, combined with those of Morpheus, overwhelmed her and she suddenly teleported away, making sure to grab the book and in a quick moment of remembrance, leaving a tip for the food. The teleportation caught the eye of Foxglove, whose eyes widened suddenly at the sight of a woman brought back bad memories, and worse ones, and she stiffened and then kicked herself internally for realizing that this was the first time in the family's adventures that she'd been the one to catch the strangeness.

She'd whispered to Hazel that she was right, that it was the same woman they'd encountered twice, and felt herself flinching slightly when Hazel grinned with a very familiar kind of grin that left her feeling insecure and slightly jealous, though she knew given her own past that if Hazel did end up sleeping with anyone else (not that she had in the long span of time since) that she could hardly have complaints about it.

\------------

TITANS TOWER, DEATH'S ROOM:

Death spent her nights in the Tower with Raven and/or Starfire, but in the wake of the incident with the Archangels, she had a room of her own, just across the hall from Raven's. In it she'd managed to steal into her own apartment just enough for the short intervals she could maintain her presence to take more of her things to make herself feel more at home. It frustrated her. Her function was recovering, slowly, but she was worried. Her realm was inaccessible to her, and her apartment was still thronged with people. If not for Dream she was fearful in what condition, if any, she'd find the place.

She stared at herself in a mirror. Lines were still carved into her ageless face, and she was still more gaunt than she was, if not nearly as much as she was before the archangels had healed her. Memories of Morpheus shook her from her reverie and she wept again, wiping her eyes. She did not need to eat as mortals did, and she spent the time with their meal focusing on tracking just how much of herself could do her function, and that slowly, but surely, the people thronging her apartment were being cleared and taken to whatever destinations they chose for themselves and whichever ways they did. She bit her lip to bite back a rather undignified whine at the frustration that would have been more the kind of noise Desire would have made than herself, and then turned her gaze away and back to this world, where she noticed that night had fallen. She'd heard and felt Raven's emotions and her conversations, attuned to her Mistress, for such Raven had become officially after becoming ruler of her Plane of Hell, with Death promoted and not entirely or indeed mostly, willingly to her Queen and consort.

Raven did not use the formal power that bound her very often, and there were only four such blank spots in Death's memories, two of which were the direct result of her going along on superhero patrols and being targeted for seemingly being a very beautiful civilian by supervillains. The other two had roots she could not explain and in truth did not want to.

The flash of Raven's memory she saw, and that voice.....she shuddered then and nearly broke down into a mess of ugly crying that would have probably led to Raven storming in and trying to comfort her for things that were her business and not Raven's at all. Of all the entities to become involved in Odin's latest gamble, _he_ was the one. One of those who had the greatest bad blood with her, rivaling that of the Morningstar with her brother Dream, and all because of Desire's machinations and foolish attempts to 'help.'

Death padded from her room, an hour after sunset, and knocked timidly on Raven's door.

Her Mistress opened the door and she stepped in, letting her Mistress clear her clothes off with a casual wave of her hand and a flash of light, her wings visible (for Raven liked the sight of them). She stood nude, and even if she was gaunter than she had been and her ageless face lined, Raven did not see anything changed or wrong in her appearance and part of her wept with relief, and joy, and contentment that it was so. Part of her still shuddered at the sight of the lines, and it was in the wake of this that Raven's hand stroked the lines and her mistress's body was close to her own, her mistress looking down on her and whispering words in her ear that she needed to hear, and she gracefully smiled and nodded in a pretense of accepting them. 

Her mistress stiffened, recognizing the pretense and Death blanched, knowing that her Mistress did not like such empathic dissonance, but her only punishment was that she was forced to kneel, rather than being on the bed, and that her mistress made clear that she'd been with Garfield Logan, knowing how much Death detested having to do this. It was not Raven's voice that spoke those words but Pride's and for a moment Death was worried that something beyond merely meeting him had rattled Raven, but her hands gripped Raven's hips and she lost herself in one part of her new role that made the rest seem to fade away, and in the iron grip of Raven's hand where the fingers lengthened into claws of sharpness sufficient to cut Kryptonian flesh even under a blue star.

Death relaxed into servicing Raven and tasting the thickness of Garfield Logan's....gifts, a taste she was unpleasantly familiar with. She never had enjoyed this and she never would, and part of her felt an ugly bite of jealousy and insecurity amplified by the older memories, by.....Raven's grip tightened and her head stung with the power of that grip and she went back to her prior task, swallowing everything from Logan and allowed to kneel back, flashing Raven a soft smile and a hopeful one as the demoness looked at her. Those were Pride's eyes behind Raven's, and the entity summoned the darkness coated in eyes and snarling mouths to hold Death in an x-shape, before summoning one of her favorite constructs, slipping into Death's aching emptiness with an audible squelching sound, Death's attempts to make sounds muffled by the darkness gagging her and even reaching down into her throat.

_How is it that you dislike that taste in another and yet you have no problem when I do this to you?_

Even if Death had wanted to answer, the darkness with its cold and heat interwoven into an immense element of overlapping everything in her mouth and her throat made it clear that she was not expected to answer, and Raven began to move, her body captive and entirely so in the hands of her mistress. Raven felt her satisfactions and her contentment at the slow but steady recovery of her function, her words soft and mirrored by the mouths and gnashing fangs within the darkness with that eldritch echo that left Death awed and satisfied to serve so worthy a mistress.

When Raven was done, and Death sagged after yet another night of multi-orgasmic bliss, Raven picked Death up over her shoulder, caveman-style, and brought her within their bed. Her wings were invisible again and she was the little spoon but this meant that she could rest, really and truly rest, and she felt safe. Memories of old and sad times receded, and there was only contentment. 

THEMYSCIRA:

Queen Hippolyta froze, the image in her Scrying Pool one that brought a look of genuine fear to her.

A vast figure the size of Uxas of Apokolips, with a sword that the Amazons saw was always there even if he could render it invisible to some. There, in the city where an Endless he held a grudge against was, weakened, and where the agents of the Aesir were at work. Odin had come to stop Ragnarok, and was still sulking around the North building up power, waiting for the coming of wintertime, and the Yule-frost. This? 

Themyscira's sacred task was to manage the more devastating appearances of the supernatural. The Morningstar and the Demiurgos were beyond their power to manage. Odin, Vili, Ve, Thor, and Frejya, they were within Diana's capacity, especially amplified with her own weaponry and with various elements the Amazonians held in trust from the Dreaming. Even moreso when she had both Donna and Cassandra to help her.

But a Jotunn King, especially this one _and_ the Aesir? One that blamed his daughter's death on the Endless and who was quite content to merely destroy to a point that he'd named his realm for that love and his people and culture with him?

She turned to Artemis of the Banu Migdoll and to Antiope, her general-in-chief. Both of whom were worthy warriors, and the equal not merely of Donna and Cassie, but of Diana herself.

She gave them quiet orders, and sent them to Man's World. The Endless in Jump City might be enjoying herself but the world did not stand still for her affairs, and this time, rather than hoping with the other major figures of the mystic arts that the Morningstar and Demiurgos didn't break and remake the universe (not that they would necessarily have known if they had) and being spectators, Themyscira could directly take action.

Seeing her two soldiers flying off, Hippolyta made a determined nod, before deciding to use her other pool, one that let her communicate with Diana, no matter where she was. This, after all, could not wait.


	3. Libraries, Lies, and the Oath:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Azar goes to the library of Dream of the Endless, into its most forbidden section of its archives, to find a tome that none but she and Dream knows exists. 
> 
> Death takes Raven to work with her, and Raven listens to the sound of her wings.

THE DREAMING, LIBRARY OF DREAM OF THE ENDLESS:

The Goddess Azar had not found it an especially taxing thing to broach the wards around the Dreaming, which had initially made her wary. All she had done was draw a door and open the handle, and then here she was. A library infinite in scale, with books that had never been written and entire universes contained within its free-wheeling elements. Many were its shelves, and among them there was a Forbidden section within the greater, where things that had been lost and yet could never have been to be lost were held. She strode into the library with confidence, willing Lucien to not see her and to her further amusement and confidence it worked, just well enough.

Here there was no pretense of humanity or half-humanity, and it was a being of dead starlight that gleamed with sickly hues that undulated like a wave and billowed like smoke that moved across the expanse of the library, and landed with a deep crunch as her form shifted and wove and rewove itself into a being that seemed more humanoid at the gates of the Forbidden Door. On it was written an old oath that mirrored one in various planes of Hell.

_Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here._

The Goddess smiled and her gauntleted right hand went to the knob and she perceived then the wards. Things of dreaming-stuff, of the imagination and the internal workings of minds that would turn on their would-be wielders, to ensnare them in illusions more truthful than the truth and falseness more real than reality. Her smile became more of a snarl and her hand moved and then the wards erupted into billows of ethereal fire that buffeted her but she was beyond any fire and she was Fire itself, an Undying Flame and the bane of the creature that was an embodiment of Evil itself, separate from those of Tyranny or the Restless Dead.

Into the chamber she walked, seeing it smaller than others, and browsed along the shelves. Countless things there were, an Anti-Monitor entrapped in what seemed to be a graphic novel held in chains, horrors ancient and discarded and forgotten. For a moment her gauntlet paused along one that said:

 _Superboy-Prime_ but she smiled and simply moved her hand along, until she came to the very bottom shelf, and the first and most ancient of the books. Seeing the name she smiled at both the book and the ankh that was on it, an ankh interwoven with a fire that seemed as a golden dawn. Taking it into her hand she froze when she knew the Lord of the Dreaming had materialized behind her. The book had a name, an ancient name, and it was very, very old and redolent with the smell of age, and suitably so. It was thirteen thousand and three hundred and sixty times the age of the living universe, and it was the repository of a being ancient in years who would be a masterful weapon, for no weapon cut more unkindly than love. 

**This is my realm, you do not belong here.**

She turned to look at him and was now the inhuman thing of billowing smoke and undulating waves, her frame monstrous and towering.

_**No, Lord Shaper, I do not. I have found what it is that I seek. Does she know?** _

Dream's look was quiet, pensive. **No, she does not.**

The Goddess smiled as she let herself will a more humanoid shape and Dream did likewise, the kaleidoscopic element of an embodiment of Dreams becoming a pale figure shrouded in white.

_**You have her heart here, even when the flesh it once held became that of your sister, the one she shuns most and sees least.** _

Dream froze, recognizing immediately elements of what the smiling Goddess intended to do.

**She was meant to rest in that book in-**

**_Meant to have a dream of a love that died at the point of a blade thrust through your sister's heart? Oh my dear Lord Shaper, there are many things you do not understand about hearts or what animates them. You do not understand this, which predates you and your library by some thirteen thousand times over. This is a story of the Dawn-times, when your sister was brittle and weak and Desire struck her heart and another with love, making her devoted to she who is held therein._ **

**_You held and have held your sister's heart, not from the dawn, not from the motif that Despair is murdered at blade point by a lover aggrieved by Desire, confirming the rule that the Endless may never have love for those who are mortal or immortal alike. You hold a thing of the dawn-time, when Xoth was in its glory and its lords not yet confined, prisoners beneath chains where Dream and Death work together to restrain them until the stars become right for them._ **

**_So here, Dream of the Endless, you who are the embodiment of stories, I shall do as stories do and have that which you deem the villain (and in a sense I suppose I am from that perspective of you and of your universe) tell you the great scheme at the beginning._ **

**_Part of me is on Earth stirring demagoguery and making known the blessings of a Deathless realm, but that will never in itself threaten a concept, nor could it. Part of me is here, with the soul of the Golden-Dawn, she whom Desire ensnared with the heart of Death, a snare that still holds Death. Part of me is in yet another place creating a new body to house this soul, to reshape and to remake her first love, from the dawn-times, and to present her with what she has held a candle for for countless infinities._ **

Dream stiffened, and the Azar smiled a terrible smile.

_**My dear boy, to seek to murder an Endless is to become it. Ask she whose soul I hold here in my hand, and whose body was remade into that monstrous thing you call your sister, reflecting the darker elements of the Jotnar in her appearance. I will not murder her, I will unmake her and reweave her from the bottom up, to reshape her into being Life. Cleanse her soul of the scourge of her darker elements and remake her, a Deathless being, as we have done in worlds beyond.** _

**We?** Dream's question was wary.

_**We who are bound by an Oath sworn by the Universal Emperor, and his servants, on a steppe. The closest counterpart in this multiverse you and your kindred are the concepts and functions that underline the most primeval elements therein is the Covenant of Baljuna. The Oath of Kelzhandar. I am she who would be considered a heretic, a Satanic figure, a Fallen angel who has taken gifts and perverted them into a terrible mirror of my father's great paradise built on a pyramid of skulls. Yet here, I have a chance to do something so much grander than the element with the World-Tree.** _

_**The Daughter of Darkness, ever a faithful servant to her Goddess in her quantum fractured state, showed me. She showed me that Life and Death in this universe are one and within one being, and that to reshape the world in my image, and in my likeness, all that I need to do is purge Life of Death, and then your remade sister shall no longer be as one of you and shall be akin to what she has become, a third in a trinity to match that of the precursor of the Presence.** _

_**You have the plan, and you could go to her , to warn her, and to thwart its unfolding. Yet to do that, O Lord Shaper, you shall have to go to your sister and tell her that you have lied to her countless times and that her heart has been within your library all these years, when she believed it lost and herself fundamentally broken and existing indefinitely from her own failure as a concept and as a person. She would see you as a liar and a betrayer, no different to Desire in those days.** _

_**Would you chance that, Dream of the Endless? Would you chance that your sister could become sundered from you and that the Endless would break beyond repair, with two of you no longer counted among your number? She would still fulfill her function, but she would become lost to you beyond all time and in future iterations it would not be Destruction who leaves but her, and a new motif written into your tales.** _

_**Or perhaps I lie to you, and if you tell her, she would understand and find in this a means to let go of her grief, and your trust in her ability to do so would heal a great harm, and in this, you would give your sister a gift that would be unimaginable and remake your own relationship from the day the Furies laid hold of your predecessor. Perhaps I snare the shaper of stories in a story in turn, wielding fear and guilt to served as fetters knowing that none else are needed, for your family is its own true nemesis, and in telling you the full truth wrapped within a set of partial truths you shall grasp which is which only when the time is ripe and it is too little and too late.** _

Dream paused, caught in a set of worries and fears and the monster laughed and then he sought to grab his book from her hand but the book vanished with her in a sudden flash of sickly brownish-green light and the monster's primordial foghorn-bellow, one that echoed across the Dreaming and in the collective unconsciousness of humanity as a trumpet that heralded an end and a beginning. 

THE REALM OF NEKRON, OUTER REGIONS:

She came here, to this realm of twilight where the after-leavings of Death of the Endless's great function produced new monsters, beings great and terrible and splendid alike, with a grave look on her face. Here, part of her had built a body, out of a mixture of the ethereal substances that could go into one, and out of elements taken from the realm of the World-Destroyers itself, from whence she had come. Here, in this realm, a concept that was in its root not so distinct to that of the Black Rings and the Black Lanterns save in unimaginably greater ambition and scale could be woven most suitable to the task for which it was set.

The body, she said, as she looked at the form. It was built as the being who had had it last had been, in a primordial dawn-time. A being of elemental fire capable of being any shape and all shapes, but ever giving off a heat that could and would end worlds. A heat that had schismed off to become one of the backdrops of the stars themselves at mystic levels.

And the soul, as she held a book, The Enchidirion of the Golden-Dawn, the Lost One who held the heart of Death and was remade in flesh but not soul as Despair of the Endless.

Then she formed the circle and began an incantation in dual-voiced power and at last Nekron became aware of the interloper in his realm and began to march toward her with the scythe in his hand intending to strike her down, yet the incantation rippled outward and became as volcano and wind and howling gale and tsunami and his motions were slowed, a terrible light burning in the endless darkness of his sphere.

In that light he could glimpse a giant and a thing that only seemed human out of amusement and a sentimental tie to a first form of flesh, as she truly was. An elemental force of endless hunger and desire to infect and remake the world. In her hands was a thing that seemed a book until it burst into a terrible flame and became a thing of such rawness of might that his endless dark and chill became lit like a Sun had risen.

THE SUNLESS LANDS:

The Sun in the Sunless Lands that had risen gleamed and was drawn to the core of itself, the rite's dissonance in time and space come nigh at last, as darkness returned to the Sunless Lands and they sank ever more deeply into that element that only she who was their mistress, and she who had been drawn into the schemes of Desire of the Endless, had ever seen in their fullest extent.

THE REALM OF NEKRON:

The light was blinding and Nekron fell to his knees covering his face and roaring in pain, as a terrible heat smote him, and then a scream followed, a scream of agony and Despair and of the endless loss of anger fulfilling a fate that must be fulfilled.

The monster that stood in his regimes did so now in a vaguely humanoid form, a towering giant of armor dark green, with a cape of bright blue, and long, flowing blonde tresses. The gauntlet reached down to clasp the hand of a being that stared blankly into the darkness, and that being looked at her with wariness and then hate and fear and found at her side a scabbard and drew from it a weapon that was not the original weapon that had slain Despair of the Endless but a weapon of her original world and her time nonetheless.

Its light burned and the monster laughed, as she raised the blade and then sliced out, tearing open the frontier of Nekron's land and dashing off into the realm between worlds.

Nekron now surged toward the giant that laughed still as the being of molten magma fled, and her eyes caught his as she reached out to grasp him by the throat in his own realm.

_**This does not concern you, creature of the Undead. Go back to your shadows, and skulk there in resentment of Life!** _

With that the entity vanished into a circular portal of murdered light, one that led Nekron pause, and then his eyes widened in his skull. _Now_ he knew where he remembered that power before.

THE DREAMING:

Death found herself in the Dreaming, as she rested in Raven's arms that night,and then found herself having that memory-dream that was a thing that stole upon her rarely, when she was on her couch and the weariness of her age and of her burden became irresistible. _She looked upon a being of molten energy, like iron in a forge, or magma compressed into humanoid form. She wore armor of brilliant gold, holding a helm in her hand, and had strode toward her as she labored on the Source Wall she'd shattered, and wiped her forehead, groaning in the physical burden and feeling weary._

_**So you're the one that broke the world because she was sad?** _

_The question was simple, almost brutal, and yet the voice that phrased it...._

_She did not see the satisfied smile on a being as pale as herself with eyes of brilliant gold, nor notice Desire's presence when she turned and saw her heart standing before her in the form of the lady of the World-Destroyers. In the fangs of her face and their shape there was an image of the second Despair already in her face, and in the way her hair of molten red was bound into a bun over her head. Death saw this but did not see it, and her heart rejoiced to see love and hope standing before her, offering her hand and telling her as she kissed it:_

_**It's not right that so pretty a girl should be so sad.** _

_And for a moment she was truly happy and loved._

Dawn came, bright and golden instead of red, and Death awoke, in Raven's arms, with tears on her face.

Raven's arms closed more tightly around her and she mewed a bit at the contact and burrowed more deeply into the embrace. Her hands still felt the kiss, and part of her felt.....strange. That had been the second of two dreams involving her, in another her old friend had gone to Dream's library and found a book that held something that could not possibly exist, had rebuilt her a body in the realm of the creature that siphoned off some of her powers and wielded them to make horrors. Had taken it and.....

Raven awoke a few minutes later, her hands sliding down Death's body as the two shared a tender kiss.

The one who had been her heart was dead and nothing could resurrect her, woven into the pattern of the Endless as the body of the second Despair. If Dream did have such a book she would have....she didn't know what she would have done.

Raven got dressed, as did Death, and the two walked arm in arm to breakfast. As usual Death did not need to eat. Unlike usual she was there at the table as Raven sipped her tea and munched on toast and waffles, watching the Titans file in, and the usual arguments between Conner and Wally, which had replaced the older ones between Changeling and Cyborg, as the two had found a modus vivendi over breakfast (but were equally prone to have equally loud arguments over supper, depending on the day, so it hadn't changed that much). Death was quiet.

The dawn had been golden, not red, that morning, the feeling of those lips on her hands, which then were rough and chipped from her working on the wall she'd broken, the.....

She was gloomy, far moreso than usual, and the rest of the team noticed. It was Kori who asked her what was wrong and Death simply said: Bad dream and the team let her be. They were like a family, this team, and a far healthier family than her own (then again so were Alexander and Lena Luthor and so were General Dru-Zod and Chris Kent so it wasn't hard to be a better family than the Endless by any means). Then, after the meal, she went to Raven and asked her quietly if she wished to see what a day on her job was like, and Raven nodded with a surprising eagerness that had her feeling warmth within her that she'd thought lost.

With that, she created another ankh, this one of a silverblue metal, and a necklace to go with it. Within the ankh was an Eye of Horus instead of an empty space, a symbol that would let her be everywhere Death herself was. It would not break her mind, right now, because she was still recovering and there were only, _only_ a few hundred thousand cases across the Fifty-One worlds. She wouldn't show her all or most of them, just let her see what it was to be with her at work.

The team looked curiously as Raven went out, clad not in her formal dress and Azarathi hood but a pair of leggings, boots, and a T-shirt that had a slogan in Arabic writing on it. A gift from Damian Wayne. Death told her quietly: 

_**When I'm at work, mortals won't see you, nor will they be truly aware. Only those to whom I'm called will. You'll see me at work as both life and death today. You showed me all of you in the nexus, with your constructs, with everything in your journals and in your mirrors. Now I'll show you all of me, and I hope you'll......** _

She stared into the distance. 

_**Only two people have ever seen this from me and Morpheus and Yeneli are both dead, so....** _

She kicked a cloud of dust lightly and on that note they went on to the first person of the day.

The old man was weary and tired of life, and yet he had expected to die years earlier. He had lived a good life, and a wonderful one, and his body was not in any pain beyond that of giving out, at last. Three years ago, death had seemed to grind to a halt and reality had slowly but seemingly nearly irrecoverably spun apart so totally even the superheroes couldn't fix it. There were many like him given new leases on life, new experiences, and there were many who relished every bit of it, and saw life as more precious than it had been before.

But he was tired. All his family were dead, and so were all his friends and he'd lived too long.

Then he saw to his surprise one of the Titans, though she wore casual clothes, and beside her.....his eyes widened. She was pale and dark-haired and her eyes were as dark as her hair, pools of endless darkness. Her smile was a sun rising in the depths of night and bringing with it warmth.

"I've missed you," he said softly.

_**I know, Terence. Take my hand.** _

He reached out to her, and as he did so, he said: "Do I go to Heaven or Hell?"

 _ **Now's when you find out.**_ She held him and he saw great wings of darkness with eyes that were as lovely and kindly as the ones in her face, a look of such love and kindness that it led him to cry in happiness. One of the wings was clipped, the other whole, but that gaze.....

There was a beating of wings and Raven waited patiently, quiet and musing on what she'd seen.

The next time they moved, it was to the bodies of a child and a dog hit by a car, and Raven felt a stab of sadness at the sweetness of the child and the awe with which they looked at Death, and at the soft tones of her voice as she knelt and hugged the child and the dog. Her voice was kindly, soothing, and the child was kept from looking at their body (something that she had not done before she'd met Raven, but that she vowed to do in the future). Again the wings flared into existence, the eyes gazing with the same kindness as her own, and in those moments she saw the side of Death that most people had seen and knew, and the only side.

A woman who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and soke to children and to the elderly alike with soothing words, whose presence radiated emotions Raven had spent much of her earlier life craving for without knowing how to find them. 

Next they came to a person made haggard by drugs, in this case a product of LexCorps and the year when Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman had vanished, leaving it to the 'lower deck' to do their task for them. These drugs had granted superpowers and this had been the case for her, a power that had let her read the minds of others and cast illusions. What they did not grant were elements that tended to come with powers that arose from the meta-genes or the more careful products of super-science. She had been driven mad by endless thoughts she could not stop.

For a few years her existence had given her a new way to live, but the wounds of her drugs had taken too deep a bite out of her, and even if they hadn't......

Two women appeared, one pale and with deep purple hair. She was fascinating and had a thread of menace, but it was the other woman who appeared with eyes of infinite night and hair to match that drew her attention.

Her face became livid and she hissed:   
  
"Where were you? I've wanted to die for three years now! My body should have given out then! I've had to sit here and watch myself be this shell of a creature that is too stubborn to die and too afraid to live for YEARS! How dare you come here now?"

The other women frowned and took a step forward but the one clad in black with the silver ankh glared at her and she remained quiet. She knelt beside her.

_**I've been hurt, too.** _

Her voice was soft and it was warmth, not cold.

"I always thought you'd be cold and icy, or challenge me to a game of chess."

The woman smiled, softly.

_**No, I don't play chess. That's my brother Destruction. And I am sorry. I have been......hurt, as I said. It has taken me time to recover. There are many who are waiting for me. I will come to all of you, in the end, and more as I get better.** _

The woman's anger was still there and then it turned more closely to Death's wings as they appeared.

"What happened to your wing?"

 _ **Someone clipped it.**_ The statement was said in a toneless sense that hid a great deal of emotions and the soul that took her hand looked in sorrow and for a moment she stroked the face of Death, who smiled at the touch and wept at a bit of compassion from someone who had every reason to hate her. In the beating of wings that soul, too, was gone.

The next soul had broken himself in a skiing accident and his hostility and belligerence reflected that he was a hefty figure built like a brick, though in a world with a Superman he was more the extreme of what humanity, as opposed to superhumanity, made possible. To him Death was a waifish Goth and he'd tried to attack her but his fists had gone through her and she'd simply stared passively and let him work it out of his system. He was harsh and he was belligerent and he was cruel, and while she smiled kindly there were little tells in the fluttering of her wings, in the slight trembling of her hands, that had Raven looking at Death differently. This was as much a face of her job as any other, and where she had love for all things, across the sheer pages and spaces of infinity, so many of them did not for her.

And of the faces they saw, the great and the small, the elderly and the young, more than half were this hostile, yet she spoke to them all with the same kindness as those who welcomed her. They walked not just on Earth, but watched a star turn supernova, a century before the light would hit Earth. She saw an idea, a concept that had long outlived the beings that had created it, know its last moments and saw Death seated by it in those elements, and saw the strangeness of abstractions when they ceased to conform to humanity and humanity's preconceptions, and it was there that she saw the true form of Death absent any kind of mortal coil. Light and dark but above all else, a deep and abiding love and warmth that was wrought into the very fabric of life and death in the universe, and that this was Life as well as Death, for the two were one.

That insight did not leave her overwhelmed nor insane with the weight of the revelation but awed and feeling a sense of trembling. This was what she'd bound, and she had done no work on the feather and unpicking its problems, for she had not really felt a need to. She felt that warmth and saw the other abstraction, a thing of hard lines and sharp curves and things she had no name for, and were only by analogies colors at all and felt the being murmur something that translated as Thank you, and heard the sound of wings.

Then they came to a set of delivery rooms, where the smell and blood and mess of childbirth unfolded. Raven was by no means squeamish but those elements and those sights had always left her viscerally uneasy, and yet here......

In each case Life strode, clad in black as she was as Death and knelt and gave the breath that marked the steps at which each being became alive, and gently ruffled hair and smiled with the same compassion that she would greet them at the end, as an old friend, who had seen things and knew things about each person.

Life came into being with a breath, Death marked a transition with an embrace and wings that beat and welcomed the embrace in turn.

She was Life-in-Death, and she was a being whose nature, whose true nature, Raven only now began to fathom and the sheer reality of why so many beings had arisen out of the woodwork when she'd begun to weaken dawned on her. She spent the whole day walking across worlds and seeing the fullness of death and life, things that did not blur into each other but became memories to treasure, and in each case, invariably, Life and Death were alike kindly beings clad in black with the ankh of silver that gleamed, and in breath and the beating of wings there was a unity that left her crying tears of mixed emotions.

THE SUNLESS REALM: 

Her sword blazed as the only light in the realm, the being having found her way here, first. From Nekron's realm to that it siphoned from at only the smallest eddies of a vast sea.

_**Hel? Hel, my love, I'm back. I'm here.** _

_**Hel?** _The Sunless lands drew their light from she who was interwoven in them both, light and dark equally, and was a figure of kindliness and love beyond compare. Yet there was no light and no warmth, only an infinite coldness, as if Hel had left Helheim. 

She called and there was nothing.

Fear grew the greater in her. Hel could not die, but that did not mean something else couldn't have happened.

_**Hel? Hel, where are you!?** _

The silence remained, and her words echoed out and left nothing at all.

REALM OF DESPAIR:

For a moment Despair of the Endless started in her mirrors, an emotion that rippled in the realm of Death combined with the unnatural element of a living being in the realm of Death. It was not this alone, but the face, and the fangs that jutted out from the lower jaw. Her hands touched her own fangs, and she looked in that mirror, bemused and confused.

**What? That's.....**

The face vanished and she remained quiet for a time. Something bad was happening. Something very bad. The thing that had come in from the shattered Source Wall and unleashed their deranged niece to scourge existence had awoken something. She felt her fangs again. Part of her remembered, for a moment, the being that impaled her predecessor on the blade and she rose to her feet, and took the sigil of a book bound by chains, and began to speak.

DEATH'S APARTMENT:

Dream of the Endless did not know what to expect, given that the number of souls in his sister's apartment continued to slowly dwindle, after the encounter in his library. He certainly did not suspect that Death's door would have the knob turn molten and run leaving trails of ash and soot, and still less so that a being who wore a golden suit top and skirt on otherwise-dark flesh that matched fully that of her uncle would stride in and find her eyes very wide. The numbers were dwindling but the place was still densely packed, and at her presence and the roiling heat that blazed from her body various souls crowded together, for fear that she was a demon of the kingdom of Remiel and Duma come to see them.

Her eyes flitted around in concern and worry, and she strode in, a sword at her side, belted to her, the scabbard adorned with the work of the Muspell-Jotnar, in an archaic design that went back to the time of Buri, first lord of the Aesir.

Her eyes flickered around, looking for Slim and Wandsworth, and Death's toy bear, Cavendish, a gift that she'd wrought from the heart of a star and bound with down from the mists of Niflheim, and that took shape as a thing of comfort. When she did not see them but did see the vast milling crowds and then....she saw Dream and froze, her eyes widening and narrowing.

She spoke, a single word low and menacing: **_You._**

Dream nodded. **Yes, me.**

_**This is not your home. Where is she, who are these people? And for that matter, why are you even here?** _

Dream raised his hands. **It's a long story, and a complex one.**

The being that looked at him looked at him with a wariness leavened with hostility.

_**Not one I'd trust from you. You'd just lock me up in a book again or have that bloated toad that stole my body from me have my soul, too.** _

She frowned.

_**She's not here. I always thought if I came back that I'd surprise here here. She's not here, nor in the Sunless Lands.** _

She bit her lip.

_**What force could take her from her own realm?** _

The being strode back through the doors and tread the steps between the worlds from the Dreaming to the elements of the broader multiverse. Her uncle had seen a world-tree, she saw a staircase that wove in non-euclidean geometry worthy of the mausoleum-realm of Xoth's tomb at the heart of the Earth. On it she strode, and let herself focus on the warmth and love that had somehow been cast out from her realm, and she paused, and stared blankly in the infinite night of the abyss between the worlds. 

A demoness had bound her on Earth and snared her in the same trap that Desire had, wielding her vulnerabilities to make her happy in slavery. Wrath boiled out from her in a sudden pillar of fire in the darkness, and she strode with a speed that left a pillar of fire in the fore by day and a pillar of cloud by night.

She lived anew, by schemes of a deity that had been barred from space and time, but she knew, and knew intimately, things that entity had either forgotten or was too mad to remember.

She came to the door of Earth-48, a thing of her love's make and she had seen each of the doors, and it was a molten ruin cloven by a blade....of her own world's make. She stared in blank confusion, and then strode in likewise, not bothering with the appearance of subtlety at first, for she was a small meteor in seeming shape in the atmosphere over the Earth, and then she occluded herself from the gaze of science. Midgard was not quite the Midgard she knew, and the simple passage of time from the book did not account for all of these changes, it was a subtle thing that had to be accounted for. Small differences could mean very big things, and in a world where she felt powerful presences as worthy as the old pantheons but new, it did not mean wisdom to simply barge into the demoness's lair and drag the one she'd bound out, and make her accept freedom.

Landing on the island of Surtsey, she knelt for a time and focused on shifting to a more truthfully human appearance, keeping her dark skin and her red hair all the same. In a world where things that looked like men could throw planets like softballs and light stars with their eyes, her appearance would merely seem metahuman. There were places, if one looked properly, where the deeper histories that lurked beneath, the passages of universes and of universal cycles, could be uncoded. Small elements of the Well of Urd and of the wisdom of Mimir.

One such place was a realm connected to a being of plants and swamps, and she had no particular desire to pit World-Destruction against one of the two champions of the Green.

Another......

She looked more closely. Yes, that was....interesting. A small town in Kansas, appropriately named Smallville. A field, where a ship from a realm of beautiful crystalline intelligences had collided and brought a super-man to Earth and awakened the new age of Gods and Monsters. The nexus point of the multiverse, and where this particular corner of it hinged.

A flash of fire and she appeared on the outskirts of Smallville, willing her appearance to seem nothing out of the ordinary. 

Go to the field, tap into the Well and the Blood.

It did not take her long to cross the town, nor to reach the place where the infant Kal-El had come to Earth, and it took her still less time to kneel there, and then her hand shifted from human to one of molten magma and she quite literally struck the Earth and in that sudden flash of everything she found the information she sought, and stared in blank horror.

For a moment, as it was reaching twilight when the full shade of information shifted, she just sat there, kneeling, beside the nexus. Her breathing was shaky.

No, she couldn't confront her.....yet.

Then she heard a sound behind her and she rose to her feet, turning in not the golden civilian clothes in the human style she wore as a masquerade, and in her human shape, but in the shape of a being of molten magma in bright golden armor, hand on the hilt of her sword, eyes flashing with a brilliant light.

Before her stood a pair of beings, one blonde-haired and resembling of all things, a musician (and she knew this primarily from the sheer osmosis of what she'd seen and how she'd seen it), another with hair dark but much lighter than the one she knew she would see again, and clad in fishnets.

"You're not from around here, mate," said the man.

Her eyes narrowed.

"We don't want any trouble."

Her eyes narrowed further and her grip intensified on the sword.

"This is Superman's stomping grounds we really don't want any trouble that'd bring him here."

Her hand moved away. The simple magic that the being whose heart she was had given her let her understand and speak any tongue, a small but essential part of her role.

She spoke, in a voice that was surprisingly high and girlish for one of a being of her nature:

_**Then why are you wielding things you think can banish me to Muspelheim, sorcerers? I am not of that realm you would seek to banish me to. Nothing in your world, or your universe, can. And there is only one being in all of creation who remembers mine besides me.** _

Her tone remained light but her smile changed and became much crueler.

_**So there is nothing in your realm, or in any here, that can hurt me. And even that Oathbreaker who is bound all the same by tenents of what she has rebelled against has unleashed something she was wiser off leaving in that book. I will take time to let what I have seen settle, then I will cut out that demoness's heart for what it has done, and with a sword to end worlds, reclaim that which is and has always been mine. I should have done this rather than impale the one who wears my face but little else of what used to be.** _

_**I made the mistake then. Now?** _

As she turned away from them John Constantine invoked a powerful charm to create a circle that would be unbreakable, bound by the greatest forces of which he had power, and the entity strode neatly into the circle, and looked at it and at him.

 _ **I did warn you,** _and she drew the blade that blazed into firey life and jammed it into the circle, which exploded with a thunderclap that shattered windows into Smallville and across a significant-sized portion of Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. In that thunderclap and that flash of light she vanished with a curt: 

_**Hah.** _

Zatanna Zatara looked at John Constantine.

"What did she mean by 'book'?"

"I don't know," John Constantine mused.

UPPSALA, SWEDEN:

Odin stiffened as he looked within the fires.

_**So those visions and rune-castings were not wrong, after all.** _

The other Aesir looked at him.

_**We wait until Yule, which is but four months hence and then, on that Yule, on that Wednesday, we strike with overpowering force. But now, the last player on the stage has revealed herself. In the small town from whence the Superman arose.** _

They looked at the fire and then at Odin.

_**I don't know what the Goddess Azar believes herself to be doing, but she has called from the grave a being who was never meant to rise.** _

They saw from the fire a conjuration of Odin's that showed them the incident where the Homo Magi and that bastard Constantine sought to entrap the Jotunn in the circle, and then she'd called forth a blade of the World-Destroyers from its scabbard and shattered the circle.

**_That is not a being of our universe, or of the universe before this one, or the universe before that. The Ogdru Jahad, the Odru Hem that the Morningstar encountered in the Over-void, are from a prior universe and only one being in creation can grant them rest. We are looking at a being from the very first universe, and the dawn of time._ **

**Like that Perpetua rampaging in the stars?** Thor's question was sincere, and Odin knew that, but at times he profoundly regretted that his smart son was in Hel's realm, the Sunless Lands, until the end of all things.

_**No, not quite. She is from the dawn-time of this universe.** _

**Then....what's the difference?**

_**In our universe, there was the initial creation of the Source, which was marred in the time when Ymir was awake and our fathers and Bergelmir had not yet awoken. The monster that rampages across the stars was made when the Endless cast off her burden and threw away her sigil, and it struck the Source Wall and shattered it, and out of that energetic byproduct was born a thing empowered with her strength, that of Life and of Death alike. She was made powerful and she remade the multiverse in her image and her likeness, to stabilize it and to bring order from the chaos, but she made it wrong. But for all that, she is of this universe.** _

_**The thing you see there, with that sword that shattered the circle, is a thing that I had thought a myth of myths.** _

_Hmm?_ It was Frejya who asked this time.

**_A very old story, the heart of Death, a being of elemental fire who was wrought into the being that is now Despair of the Endless after avenging an old insult on Desire of the Endless by slaying the one Desire loves most. It was said that the body was slain but the soul of a being of that realm can never truly die, and that it was wrought into a powerful gem shaped like a heart, and from there it became a part of things that were lost and never truly expected to reappear._ **

He frowned.

 ** _That is the original soul of the being rewoven into one of the Endless, in a new body that matches her old one._** A few minutes later the earlier words registered.

 **The heart of Death?**

_**The very same, the one that Desire ensnared her with love in, half a billion years before the parliament, and just after she had returned to her position as one of the Endless. But if what I see is correct, then we have a problem that none have quite foreseen. And given her nature, and what it means, there are reasons for this, much as the being called Karen Starr is a walking paradox able to slide between worlds and a rasp to solve the unsolvable.** _

**Oh?**

**_Yes. The unleashing of a being from the Dawn-Time has awoken a paradox._ **

**Why hasn't this happened with the entity called Power Girl? Isn't she also from a multiverse that no longer exists?**

**_Oh it has, my son, it has. Her presence has created at least one of the Crises, the one involving another being of her multiverse, and one that affected even us directly. It is my belief that it in part reflected on elements, too, with Doctor Manhattan's attempts to rewrite our reality as well, he could not erase her any more than he could Superman, and not for lack of trying. She invariably returned. And that is one from one multiverse here, in living memory of all who are mortal in this one._ **

The Aesir stiffened.

 **So then if she did that.....** Thor spoke, brushing his chin and unusually thoughtful for being.....Thor.

They looked at the being here.

**Then the Heart of Death is a walking destructive force far greater than her uncle, and knows nothing of this.**

Thor made a low whistle.

**Ah, well. Not like we haven't fought against such things before.**

The other Aesir nodded, though Odin and Freyja remained quiet.

RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

Raven had her arms around Death, resting her head on her shoulders, and stared quietly at the feathers, a palpable guilt curdling her insides. The sight of what she'd seen, the nature of life and death and their interwoven elements, and the humbling reality that whether greeted with kindness or contempt or outright assault Death was kindness incarnate and love and was always welcomed, in the end, in an embrace and a look of such love that nothing in existence could compare. She'd caged someone whose caging risked far too much, and that couldn't last.

 _I need to start figuring out how to undo that feather, my love,_ she said. Then kissed Death on her right shoulder, as the Endless just stared into space, shell-shocked. She'd felt a pulse of energy from Kansas that couldn't possibly be right, after feeling that same energy literally fall from Heaven through the cracks between the worlds.

Turning to Raven, she spoke quietly: **_Did I ever tell you why the other Endless are forbidden to love mortals?_ **

Raven nodded. _Dream and Kilalla._

**_Sort of. That confirmed why there needed to be the rule. Before that, there was another, and here, I think, I need to tell you. And I suspect we'll be seeing at least Zatanna, maybe John again and you'll need to hear this from me before anyone else does._ **

She squeezed Raven's hand gently.

_**How much lore of my family do you know?** _

_I know a fair bit, though there were only allusions in Azarath's libraries to something called the Heart of Death, and to the idea that you'd had your heart taken from you by Desire and that it was bound in a gem._

Death laughed, softly, and sadly, a note of tears marring the laughter.

_**Not quite. It wasn't in a gem, and there was, I thought, nothing to bind. But I will tell you, I will tell you of my heart, and how that heart was lost, and the first of the two reasons that Desire and I get along even less well than Desire and Dream do.** _

She took Raven's hands in hers and turned to face the other woman, and opened her mouth to begin to tell the tale, figuring that having at least one other person knowing it might even exorcise the old hurts. Whatever had fallen from the skies could not possibly be that one, she had become Despair and there was nothing left of her except the traces of her face in what was now her sister's.

There was only one thing left of her universe, and it would do good to have another start to hear those tales of days gone by.


	4. Strike for Love and Strike for Fear:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Despair talks with Destiny. 
> 
> Death tells Raven a very old story. 
> 
> The Atomic Skull goes west and has a very bad day.

GARDENS OF DESTINY:

Destiny of the Endless paused when his gallery chimed and of them all, it was his sister Despair. It had been easier to accept he who was once Daniel Hall and was now Dream by far than Despair, whose murderer now quite literally had become her. Even he, who knew how little choice in matters there truly was, had that emotional reaction to her presence that was visceral, though he controlled it far better than most of the family. Such was the responsibility of the eldest brother, after all. He knew at one level beyond the pages of his book the only thing that could lead to this kind of summons, and indeed as Despair manifested fully and worried at her cheek with one of her hooks, the look on her face said it all.

She spoke two words all the same: She lives. 

_Who?_ His book said that he asked the question and even included one of those obnoxious captions in those annoying yellow boxes as he did so with knowledge of the answer, yet having to ask. Even included his editorial commentary on the yellow boxes, to boot.

The Kinslayer.

That gave him the start he knew he'd have as soon as he saw the page.

_You are sure?_

I saw her in my mirrors. She was in the Sunless Lands, as a living person.

That led to another start.

He murmured something to himself that was indecipherable and for a moment closed his book, knowing that when he opened it it would be where it would be and that everything that followed would make sense.

_Are you all right, sister?_

She looked up, surprised. It was not in her nature to be more than neutral even at her most content but she was at that apex of neutrality in expression and demeanor.

No, my brother. I am not. Seeing her awoke memories in me, of the Despair-who-was and of the me-who-was, likewise. I was punished for my transgression, but now a part of me lives, and I do not know what to think of it.

Destiny nodded, conceding the point.

_That is true, my sister. You are my sister, and you have been since.....that fate was resolved._

Despair nodded in turn.

She was calling for our eldest sister. By the name that pantheon and its rivals know her.

Destiny sighed.

_She still loves her, doesn't she?_

I believe so. She realized that too late when she began to transform into me. I don't want my sister to suffer for my actions again, and the part of me that is my murderer is frightened. 

Destiny nodded again.

_She should be frightened, the being that murdered your predecessor was powerful enough to have murdered one of us by a blade in the old days. What's more, though I shall have to ask questions of our brother Dream as to how, it both is you and it is not you. There are flashes of this in my book, and I shall need to have words with my brother for explanation on these things. We shall speak again soon, sister. I do not think she would go near you._

Despair nodded and returned to her realm and with a look of anger on his face, Destiny paced in his garden. He was not looking forward to this particular conversation with Dream, given that Dream and Delirium were all that tied Death to the rest of the family these days now that Destruction had left, she was incapable of being in the same room as Despair, and Delirium only needed intermittent appearances by Death to meet her needs. There were no good paths from this point, but the truth had to be faced all the same.

RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

_**This story, you must remember, is not that of the events of this lifetime, as the Endless reckon it, nor the thousandth, nor the ten thousandth. This is from the very first universe, the one that set all the stories in a pattern that diverges only slightly with my mood or whim or simple frustration with going on for so long. In the youth of my existence, I did cast away my function and my role as an Endless, as I did in all the others. Not in the sense of brother Destruction, who refused to rule his realm but retains his title and his function, and since he is change in any event it was perhaps an inevitability but I do not in truth think so.** _

_**I threw away my ankh, and I willfully cast of everything of being Death.....or life. I was free to be myself and in doing so I think I wrote into existence a fundamental rift with my siblings, all of whom, even Destruction have been tempted to do this but none of them have.** _

Starfire came in, then, and Death knew and did not care at one level, as she loved Koriand'r, too. Raven gave her a quick fill-in and Starfire immediately closed the door and sat beside Raven, holding her hand.

_**After that time, reality nearly unraveled and it became locked into the cycles of the lives of the Endless that I would do this and shore up the Source Wall progressively stronger, lest another incident or lapse on my part break it. And for thirteen thousand, three hundred and sixty-plus universes, that has held true. No lapses, but a buildup of issues that became insuperable and overwhelmed me. My brother-sister Desire knew that I was sad and hurting and Desire did what xie does best. Xie decided that I needed a lover, someone who would show me Desire's own sphere, and someone who understood me.** _

_**So she met me after a day laboring on the Wall and she joined me, and for a few million years, I was together with someone I thought loved me for me, and vice-versa. She was the niece of the King of the land of the World-Destroyers, a species of volcano-entities made by my brother Destruction. A sorcerer of surpassing skill, the sorcerer-supreme of her people. It was precisely for this that when I prepared to propose to her, and would have been the first of the Endless to be betrothed, before Delirium, that she deciphered that there was a spell on both of us, and my brother-sister Desire came in response to her picking up xir sigil and demanding xir presence. My sibling arrived, and told her the truth and was grateful that I had found someone who understood everything that I was, in spite of it, and hoped that that would be the end of it.** _

_**The first thing that I knew was that Desire was literally hurled through a wall of our apartment, with burns on xir body, and she looked at me and yelled things at me that I did not understand then and raised her blade and placed it.....** _

Death let a set of carbonized scars form on her face along my body in this way, _**to punish me for what she believed I had done. When she saw that I dropped the ring that would have been a sign of a proposal and wore one, she was speechless and then left in fire, and I experienced then heartbreak. I refused to heal the wounds, seeing them as a punishment for a crime that I committed, and Desire said nothing to either of us, staring in horror at the way things changed.**_

_**Two billion years later, after the parliament, and the incident with Kilalla of the Glow, she came to me again when I was talking to my sister Despair, with whom I was not close then, but we were still family. She raised her sword, Desire running in from her, and went straight to Despair and told Desire:** _

_**Now you'll know what it feels like to have the one you love taken from you by treachery and that there is nothing you can do to stop this.** _

_**Her blade moved out and it thrust into our sister's chest, and I took her then only to see the woman I loved go to me and tell me enough of the truth that i understood it, only for her to transform into the second Despair, whose face preserves her tusks and her preferred hairstyle from when her forms have hair, that is. And then, at last, I understood what happened and for several billion years after, my siblings knew nothing of me, and I refused summons to multiple conclaves, because I could not dare to be in the room with the person who I loved, who murdered my sister, and with the person who engineered xir own twin's murder out of pride and folly and selfish things.** _

_**I go to the conclaves now, when I am called to them, and I am still close to my brother Dream, and to Del. My family and I are....on worse terms than you and yours, for your father and your brothers do not love you as you wish you were loved but they do love you. I'm not sure any of us in the Endless ever learned how. Or if we were meant to. Nothing I've seen in all those universes has said this.** _

She clutched her wrist and scratched along her arm slightly, an old habit from several universes brought on by the memories, Raven wincing slightly at the sight.

_**As far as I knew, she who was my heart died, in that first universe without any trace. Died and became interwoven into the fate of Despair, whom is murdered, and always at the hands of the person who loved me, because of Desire, and from Desire and love of Death fell into and became Despair. Then today, I felt her fall from the skies and felt her again in Kansas.** _

Raven sat up very straight.

_Her, as in Despair or?_

_**No, not Despair. She who was my heart, then. She shouldn't be alive, as far as I knew her being fell into non-existence when she became interlocked into the histories of the Endless. She would.....** _

She mused.

_**You know how Karen Starr takes all the usual rules about Kryptonians and treats them like that turtle did the backbone of that shark in that movie?** _

Raven nodded, raising an eyebrow (Mary Poppins was one thing, imagining Life and Death watching Gamera vs. Zigra was something else again. Garfield had wheedled her into it and she'd given him a 'Raven bath' afterward. The 90s Gamera films were....not bad, but that atrocity?).

_**She does that because she's not merely from a universe that no longer exists, but a multiverse that doesn't. For the Endless, your changes are no more than perspective shifts, tales and details arranged and rearranged, as in each of these universes there is Destiny, myself, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. As our concepts endure, unchanged, so do we. We if anything may have opinions on how those changes unfold, sometimes very strong ones, but.....it is there all the same.** _

_**She is the last trace of a multiverse that existed a long time ago, a very long time ago, and changed when the Anti-Monitor laid siege to it. The very last, after the incident with Alexander Luthor. No kryptonite in this universe can affect her, and this universe's magic has inconsistent restraints on her. In another two Crises it would have none at all, for the rules would have altered too far from what she knew. And that was one multiverse ago, in a time where all who dwelt in that first had successors in the second, except her.** _

_**Well.....my heart would be like that, except that instead of one it's....** _

_Over thirteen thousand._

_**Yes.** _

Death was quiet afterward. Then spoke on in a haunted tone.

_**She was supremely powerful and destructive, none else could have murdered an Endless, even one of the youngest, with something so superficially straightforward as a kin of her uncle's sword. She was willful, and brash. And she is now somehow, impossibly, resurrected in a multiverse that has changed so far from the world and the people she knew that she will be isolated, detached. And she was smart, so she'd grasp soon that she has nobody else who might understand her besides me.** _

Raven blinked.

_You really meant that, you're that ancient?_

Death nodded.

_**Of all the Endless, I am the only one who is truly Endless. The only one who is condemned to live like this, to endure so many of the same heartaches. Half the reason I broke down was how much monotony like this does weigh me down. Leaves it all feeling like none of it means anything. With you, no matter how this ends up, I've changed. It was selfish of me, but this is the first new thing I've done something truly and individually unique, for myself, in all that time. With you.** _

Her eyes turned to Koriand'r. **_And with you._ **

Raven blinked again. _Do we...._

Death shook her head. **_No, you don't remind me of her. They broke the mold when they made her, and it's fortunate. A universe with more than one of her would die under the strain._ **

She shuddered. _ **If she is alive, she would want to....I don't know what she would want. She told me shoved me, after she marred my face, and attacked me without any real reason and broke my heart. She would remember the love, not the heartbreak, nor that there was nothing that day except an attack without any visible context on one of my siblings, even one I am not overly fond of, and an attack on me. Out of nowhere.** _

Death stared blankly into space for a long time.

_**My heart lives again, and I fear what it means. Someone had to find a means to do it, but there is nothing left of that era. Even something that was alive then couldn't just invent something like that, and there is no going back. Even a being that could go up and down the courses of time is subject to its perceptions and pathways in any given portion of Existence. Someone resurrected her, with impossible means, and made a thing real that should not be.** _

Death held her hands in her head and rocked, weeping, and Raven moved to her cautiously, putting her hands around her shoulder.

She gave her the time to cry it out, then moved her hand away.

_You don't have to have....._

Death nodded. _ **I know. Tonight....just hold me. Those memories are never easy ones. I'm surrounded by people, who love me, who try to love me, and I'm alone, all alone, and i don't know what to do and it's....**_

Raven held her and that night passed much more peacefully, even when Death felt a powerful flare of mystical energy, and so did Raven, much further south in California. Raven was appalled at what she felt and at the warnings of Death proving if anything, understatement.

LOS ANGELES:

For the Atomic Skull it had started out as a very good day. Los Angeles was filthy stinking rich, Superman and Supergirl were off-world and Power Girl was otherwise occupied (as well he knew) by others of Superman's Rogues Gallery who could have all the fun of fighting her. He'd come to town and had a high old time wading through police and even gang gunfire and making hella bank when he did, until later that evening he encountered a bored-seeming metahuman with skin dark as night and hair that flowed near to her waist that seemed unnaturally brightly red, with a palpable sense of heat from her presence.

At last, a fight worth having! 

He'd made the usual kind of theatrical threats and she'd just rolled her eyes, hand on the hilt of a sword marked with very valuable-seeming gems worked into something that was not a human pattern.

He'd hurled a fist at her and she'd lazily caught it in a grip of iron that left a crater around them, and then he'd seen her smile as she drew the blade, which was marked with runes in that same non-human tongue.

Her eyes flashed as red as Superman's when they fought, and her grin was savage, like that of Orion of New Genesis, and then she'd hurled him back and the blade ignited in fire that flowed along the runes like liquid. Trees and buildings either caught fire or melted, and the fire hydrants burst in his rampage evaporated from the sheer weight of the heat. To the Atomic Skull it was warm but nothing worth writing home to mama about, as he smashed his fists against his breastplate in a mockery of Grodd, the sword raised and the being spoke in a strange tongue that was like nothing he'd ever heard before.

The closest analogy was to a video he'd seen when he was still a man of the Justice Society fighting the entity Surtr, but this seemed archaic in a sense.

Then the blade flashed down and he caught it in his hands, smirking.

**You might have the fires of mythology, babe, but I have the fires of SCIENCE!**

With that he sought to yank the blade out of her hands and then it dawned on him just how hot the blade was and he sprang back as she smiled again and slammed the flat of the blade against him to hurl him back, leading to his colliding with the ground in a sickening crunch.

The fire flashed away and the creature put the sword back in the scabbard and that same tongue echoed, and then she was no longer a metahuman but a colossus that towered over him and reached to halfway up the skyscrapers and made of magma. Mystics worldwide registered a sudden pulse of energy and magic that cast effects broadly into the mystical realms, even Faerie, where flowers withered in the wake of flames, and the alarm bells of the Lords of Order and Chaos alike rang out.

In Siberia, where he was slumming for a time while parsing the first pulses of energy he'd felt that couldn't quite be true, Surtr froze. He knew that energy all too well, but it didn't feel like itself, it felt more ancient and more powerful than could quite be the case. And it was of his people and of his kind.

Magma-like fists slammed into the Atomic Skull and left a crater and a forest fire raging that scoured the hills around Los Angeles, and footprints that were molten and of no known kind of entity that could have produced them. The entity that left him stunned and repeating a single word over and over again was gone, and none noticed the being of skin dark as night and with firey red hair that slouched out in what was and wasn't a leather jacket and a long skirt looted to conceal bright golden-seeming armor. 

In his Gardens, Destiny knew the time was nigh and raised the sigil of a mask-like skull with part of the neck vertebrae attached and summoned his brother. And to that summons responded Dream of the Endless with an expression of visible uncertainty.

In the Watchtower, Uxas of Apokolips and the other exiles of that realm were startled out of doldrums by a sudden rippling force of power from an Old God as mighty as Yuga Khan, and the eerie lights of hellfires that had flared and vanished as swiftly as they'd come.

For a time Uxas had languished, uncertain. His son, Kalibak, daughter of the only woman he loved, was no doubt tormented worse by his own father than was so by him, and he'd fought for him and shown him that in the end he was his mother's son and that meant more than anything else. His father had returned and waged intermittent clashes with the monster rampaging across the stars, with only his old foe Highfather able to serve as anything of a break on him besides the beast. Until now. A new factor, greater than either of them, and at her hand, a means to contain Yuga Khan and regain his throne.

Darkseid's grin was unpleasant. And then he sobered. Anything that powerful would have its own agenda, and it would not be easily controlled. More to the point there was a being capable of summoning such force, for this entity had only sprung into existence, seemingly, in the last twelve hours, if that long ago.

Darkseid, moved out of his doldrums, began to pay much closer attention to the snarled harangues of the creature that called herself Azar, a name of a very, very old Goddess, rumored to predate the current multiverse, and perhaps others, too. And as he listened, he heard with strange ferocity and passion promises of a deathless world of paradise, and he saw the Azar's sermons and for a moment an image flashed back to his mind. A towering thing in dark green armor that had laid siege to existence with the power of the Gem of Trigon and the imagery of a World-Tree. An entity powerful enough to awaken Perpetua, deeming her no threat, and to summon whatever manner of abomination had crawled its way out of the depths of the past. 

And an entity that had a tie to a rumored cabal of multiversal imperialists whose vision was a realm without death, not unlike that realm in the other multiverse, a Cancer-verse save that it was opulent and paradisical, a Black Mercy vision made real. His red eyes narrowed. This was his realm to conquer, and for too long he'd let the fear of his father and of other entities slow him down. Old Gods were irrelevant, their time was past. Only the one that had sprung into existence now portended a real threat and he was not sure precisely of the nature, but that was the more reason to discover what he could.

The fires in his eyes burned again and he growled with a sense of restored purpose and strode over to the Watchtower. He had lived on the sufferance and tolerance of others, and that weakness would need to be exorcised doubly with a return to this world to attack it purely to remove the taint, but it still endured, for now. First things first, to talk to the servants of the Lords of Order, for what he sensed, Nabu and the Zatarra-whelp would have sensed likewise.


	5. Wonders of Fire, Hearts of Ice:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the incident with the Atomic Skull in Los Angeles, Diana of Themyscira tracks the monster responsible to the Texas Hill Country, where she sets about going about her usual business. 
> 
> Destiny and Dream of the Endless have an unpleasant conversation. 
> 
> Death goes to work in two different worlds and encounters an old friend.

THE TEXAS HILL COUNTRY, TWENTY MILES SOUTH OF SAN ANTONIO:

The Jotunn, who had yet to retake her name, or to fully remember it, was enjoying a day walking around in the heat of her own being. The Texas Hill Country, normally lovely at this time of year with wildflowers, had become a scorching desert of cracked ground, and she relished the sensations. The fight with the being with the glowing skull had been amusing, if a reminder that the new aeon had forces worth taking at their full extent of seriousness. Another force of this new aeon swooped in near her in an arc of red and white and blue, and her eyes whipped around, as she dispelled the glamour of her other clothes with a blink of her eyes.

Diana found herself facing a being of a kind that she'd faced before in the various tasks that she did that none of her fellow heroes truly knew, and it was not really their business that they should in any event.

The Jotunn that stared at her was strange, she knew most of the more powerful Jotnar of the World-Destroyers or the Frost-Giants that sought to go on a rampage every so often but she'd never seen this one. There was only one being known to her in the bestiary of the Amazons that even partially matched the description, and it was a thing renowned for a feat that defied the imagination and caught the envy and the fear of later generations of both monsters and monster-slayers.

She spoke the name:

"The Heart of Death, slayer of Despair of the Endless."

The thing smiled at her with fangs that looked uncannily familiar though she could not place quite where.

_**Is that what they call me? I who was once Yeneli, niece of Surtr, King of the World-Destroyers, whose task it is to unmake worlds in fire?** _

She drew from an ornate scabbard at her side a blade adorned with runes that were of Jotunn-make, but the sword too did not match the pattern she'd seen before. The other swords she'd seen were shorter swords, more like a Roman Gladius. This was a claymore and the runes were not quite, seemingly archaic, both with sharper lines and more ornate, almost like Chinese characters.

The thing that smiled at her had seemed a very dark-skinned human woman but was now a living volcanic embodiment of fire and fury and the destruction that laid low worlds. The sword had grown in size with her and the runes flared and from them flowed fire up the blade like a liquid until it burned with a heat that surprised Wonder Woman. She was made of clay and did not sweat as a true human did, but the heat reminded her uncomfortably of a kiln.

 ** _I did slay Despair of the Endless with this blade, little daughter of Hippolyta, child of the soil. I slew the kindred of Ymir by the score that crawled from his body and sought to infest the regions around my city, and from this learned much in the ways of magic. i plunged this blade into the very heart of Death herself, when I believed her to have betrayed me and gave her a wound she may not remember exists, but I do. She may remember the wounds to the face, but it was the heart that was struck next, and where Despair died, Death did not_**.

For a moment the thing seemed pensive. The thing that had been torn out on her blade, blackened into a kind of obsidian like substance, she held to herself in a dimension that nothing and no creature could touch. She wondered, sometimes, if this was why she'd been blessed with that endless good dream until the thing had re-embodied her. A portion of the very heart of Death ripped clean of her, interwoven with magic, a thing, a gruesome memento, that she treasured. A thing known only to her, for a time. And perhaps to her love. 

**_I shall find her, I shall cut out the heart of the demoness that has enslaved her, and we shall be one again, Death and her heart, and I shall remake this unsightly blemish in my own image._ **

The thing smiled.

**_After all, I am no mere product of a realm of creation and destruction alike, I am a sorceress who knows the ways of magic, not merely of the Well and the Tree._ **

The being then chose to compress her size until she was merely four feet taller but still broader than Wonder Woman, near the proportions of the creature Doomsday.

**_I am not the near-feral gutter-trash of Muspelheim that goes up to raid against the protection of you Amazons, nor am I a creature of this realm. You might have experience facing our kinds of creature and banishing us back to our realms, but you have never faced me._ **

Diana wasted no further time with words and lunged out with her sword, which the being blocked with a sudden motion of strength that surprised Wonder Woman for both its speed and the sheer strength behind the parry.

This set the tone for the first stage of the clash, Diana's strikes far more skillful and her skill with the blade far superior likewise, but the monster's strength was awesome and its heat was such that the full weight of the power of Hephaestus Himself saw full employment in restraining the might of the blade. Diana found herself devoting not the more casual displays of her skill and of her power but the full measure of her skill to a point that a mortal that saw the clash would have seen her as a blur of blue and white and red and flashes of light next to slower and more lazy-seeming moves from the monster. 

The creature was enjoying herself immensely, that much was clear, and Diana growled. It was seldom that such a beast made a boast and had the power to back it up, but this was one of those times, and she raised her lasso, dropping her sword, and as the being grasped her blade in two hands and prepared to bring it down, the Lasso of Hestia swooped down past the blade and grasped its wrists, the creature suddenly frozen by indecision.

The lasso blazed with a powerful light as Diana said "Kneel."

Against her will the being did kneel, the lasso blazing with light that led to a frozen gaze of shock and even wonder.

Diana raised the Godkiller, and told her: "This may not be sporting, but it is not a sporting thing to fight your kind. You are monsters, and nothing more."

With that Diana took the Godkiller and thrust it into the creature's heart, knowing that the blade would do its task, and banish it back to Muspelheim from whence it came (and her private worries and fear that the thing had shown no sign of exhaustion and would have potentially worn her down by sheer endurance until her being gave out she kept to herself).

She waited, and then the being smiled and spoke a Word of Power and her lasso sprang from the creature's wrist and fell on the ground, as it remained kneeling with the blade jammed deep in its heart. It threw back its head in howling laughter, which smote the air like peals of thunder.

_**She truly has not forgotten me! She will not allow me to die! After all these years, Hel, you remember me!** _

She looked at Diana. ** _I did not know for sure that she did. We are the last, you see, she and I. The last of the dawn of all things. She alone among the Endless remembers that first world, when the world was young and the mountains green, and there was no shadow on the moon. She was there, and I was there, and we were linked in soul even before my blade tore through her heart and left a scar that no passage of time can yield._**

With that the being grabbed the hilt of the Godkiller and drew it from her with a hiss of pain, molten blood visible. Her vision swam a little. She could not die, but having a blade meant to end the chiefs of pantheons hurled through the heart and the spine was not a thing to lightly shrug off. 

_**So that's what that must have felt like to the Endless**_ , then, as she looked at the molten blood.

She hurled the blade down and its edge smashed into the ground and raised herself to her feet, woozily, stumbling slightly. A low grumbling keen of pain echoed but she shook her head, determined. Then a smile of radiant triumph crossed her face. 

_**She will not allow me to die, and I will not go back to the Dreaming.** _

Then as she looked at Diana she smiled and raised her right hand and began an incantation of power that immediately led Doctor Fate and Zatanna to teleport to the battlefield but it was too late. A massive column of flame moved out and slammed into Diana, cursing her that her power as a being of clay begin to turn against her and that she go back to the ground from whence she was made.

 _ **Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,**_ the creature finished with a deliberately wry grin, and then she vanished in a swirl of fire. Not yet was it time to face her love, and it was clear that lingering in the United States was too likely to see another such conflict. She hurt, that blade would have not merely banished other Jotnar but outright slain them if they were incautious. It was only the protection of her love that shielded her, and as her vision blurred she made a low moan of pain and the swirl of fire erupted into a brilliant phoenix-like shape in the sky, and she found herself falling into the realm of Khandaq, whose ruler stared in mute shock at the sudden appearance of a vast firebird and the thing that fell from it, trailing blood.

"What the fuck?"

THE GARDENS OF DESTINY:

Dream, I hold your sigil and I am in my gallery. Come to my gardens. Now.

With that Dream of the Endless found himself summoned to his brother's realm, looking around with worry and with distaste, as only Death could go through the realms of the other Endless without grave discomfort (and part of him kicked himself for such a horrible pun and yet).

I am here, my brother.

_Despair told me that the Kinslayer lives. And has a new body. Do you have something to tell me, brother?_

Dream froze, then nodded, with visible unease.

**The thing that calls herself the Azar came to my library and to my forbidden shelves, where the most dangerous creatures are locked unless the invisible eyes beyond wish them awakened anew. She found our sister's heart in the book that was first to appear in my library, and the only one that I did not myself make.**

Destiny froze.

_I believed, when she murdered our sister, that she would not be able to return to life. She became Despair, and there was nothing left of her._

Dream shrugged.

**It was not so, her soul endured, disembodied.**

_And you did not tell our sister?_

Dream looked at him with a kind of helpless fear.

**What would you have me tell her? That the soul of one who could never live again endures? A being that nearly destroyed her with the blade that did murder our sister, and who returned from a failed murder of one of us to succeed in the second attempt? A being that for all that has her heart, and has left a wound that none of our arts can heal?**

Dream's look became the stern and regal one of a king.

**I have lost enough of my family, brother, that I will not risk losing the only one of our siblings that truly understands me. She would never forgive me for keeping this secret from her, any more than Desire would. Our sister loves one monster that ripped her feathers out and binds her as a slave, though she does not accept that this what she is. And she loved another that became the very embodiment of the name her world gave itself, and sought to murder her in a rage. She cannot and will not see these things, and the last time one of us had an argument that they could not and would not accept, that one fled.**

Destiny nodded at one remove, accepting that point.

_Perhaps you had too little faith in her, brother._

Dream's gaze was harsh. To hear an echo of the monster's words, the thing that hovered around their sister's presence and was threatening an act of great menace, and to hear it from his older brother was just too much. 

**Do not tell me this, brother. I would accept chiding from her, or even from Desire, but not from you. You always watch us and our misfortunes, and you do nothing about them, you seldom even give us indirect warnings. Our sister's heart burned and her essence nearly unraveled from a blade meant to lay low gods and a world-tree, and you did nothing. Another of our sisters was unmade and did unravel by that same blade, you did nothing. Our brother Destruction left us all, and you did nothing.**

**I was captured by Roderick Burgess for thirty years and then bound by mortals with a folly that sought to bind imagination in turn, and you did nothing.**

**Desire is a monster but they have points, brother, that are there even if I am often too proud to accept them. You? I will never accept a moral lecture from the great voyeur who watches events and has the power to shape them but never, ever allows himself to wield it.**

**You do not shame me for keeping my sister's heart safe where the thing was there for billions of years until the monster stole her way in. Nothing, so long as the Source Wall endured, could get into that portion of my books and call the soul out of its binding. The Wall broke, brother Destiny, not because of me, but because our sister let herself become weak and in her weakness has damned us all to that giggling niece of ours burning entire portions of the multiverse in that clash with the creature on Apokolips, and here you are, lecturing me over something that I did not break, she did!**

Destiny remained silent.

_Brother Dream, it is no easy burden to know this. I know when I am forbidden to act and when it is that I can act. Five times shall I act before the universe ends._

Destiny waved his hand and a vision of the vast multiverse formed ex nihilo, parts of it charring beneath the rival touches of Perpetua and Yuga Khan, each of whom offered a different vision of damnation and becoming devoured in a war of gods.

_We failed here, my brother, not simply because we have made monsters, but because our issues as a family, as you put it, have gone beyond awkward silences when asked to speak and to be together. Up to a point we are allowed this luxury, but that point has its limits. These are those limits written in the raw. Five times shall I intervene brother, and the first of the five is drawing nigh._

That made Dream pause.

 _It is the curse of power, brother, and of knowledge where each are alike the same, that one can be all powerful or all knowing, but not both at once. Usually. Here, my realm is in flux, and there are others of me that appear in and out of existence, reflecting the nexuses. Each marking different paths that can be trod. My sister's folly has brought us to a precipice, but rest assured, after those endless years of watching and being damned to watch and to do nothing, I am relishing a moment where I am free to actually act, where Destiny goes from being the backdrop of existence to its arbiter_.

Destiny's eyeless face met Dream's expression of anger that was not that of Morpheus but that of Daniel, and a near-perfect mirror of Hippolyta, of Lyta Hall, and Diana of Themyscira.

_There shall be but four more times until she takes my book. When it comes, brother, you shall see why it comes as seldom as it does. We are not as the beings of Apokolips or New Genesis, and we have not been meant to be. Old Gods and Old Monsters walk again, and hidden things have come to light._

Mortals seldom remember we exist. but after this time, for a very long time, they shall be unable to forget.

DEATH'S APARTMENT:

As Dream of the Endless went to the Gardens of Destiny to speak to his brother, the Goddess Azar strode into the apartment boldly, as she had the realm of Dream. This was a less impressive feat, for Dream had left the door unlocked and unguarded when in truth, it was the person and the presence of Death that made it so either could be and she was incapable of remaining in her own realm and its throneroom for long. The souls of the dead froze at the bow-shock of her arrival and they cringed against the walls, seeing the nature of the Deathless being that strode into the room, looking with contempt at the absence of the smaller touches of home.

Her tread was heavy, far heavier than her human-sized frame or the one she preferred as her avatar indicated. That only made the mortals hide more closely, as she smashed open doors and searched, finding a room of tapestries that led her lips to curl and nothing else seem to be there, then looking around further until she froze. Another room, two to the left of the one with the tapestries, had ankhs. Over thirteen thousand ankhs, one made to suit each universe....and beyond them all, a sigil that transcended them, the one in her gallery.

The Goddess smiled and willed a bit of the elements of her that she kept constrained to emerge outward and a terrible gleam echoed in the apartment, the light carrying with it a sound that shattered across the walls of existence, which thrummed with a power that was of no natural origin, and she strode into the room, her eyes flashing with flame. Her hands glowed with unlight that served as a shield and the unlight began to form around the command sigil, the thing that transcended all the lifetimes. She noticed the sigil had a deep groove, dark as night, like the kind of scar left by the cut of a blade and a sneer already on her lips intensified.

The grip worked, and the sigil was pried from where it remained, though the rest were unharmed.

With it in her grasp, reliant on the unlight as a shield from the power within and all else that was there, the Goddess Azar vanished in a flash of light that left a stench of stagnant water and low and smoky elements that were not quite those of death but of things that had lived too long.

DEATH"S ROUTE:

That day, Death went to work and she felt a part of herself seemed to be missing, and had a blinding pain on the side of her head that did not go away but seemed to intensify. It felt like part of her very nature was under the grip of something terrible beyond reckoning. Yet she went about her duties, seeing to her satisfaction that the vast crowds that thronged her apartment had been reduced now by its first billion of some few dozen left to go, and that across the worlds she came to people of all ages, species, genders, and sizes. To ideas and to gods and to planets and to anything that had life and thus experienced changes.

Warm smiles were given and quiet words and calmness, and understanding. Hostility in many cases, welcomes, surprisingly fervent, in others. She was to many a beautiful thing, to others a fearful one and a hopeless one, yet she showed up to them all and offered them kindly smiles and the wings that opened with eyes of kindness that shone. As her function continued to grow the pain in her head was sharp, though it did not grow quite in the way that other pains she knew had. A man she took to her, formerly a rich and powerful man who had met the end of that richness and power, was the first one to notice, and to tell her that he didn't know even she could hurt, and she'd looked at him with a lack of certainty, at first.

He had smiled and given her the hug, instead of the other way around, and she took him with the sound of wings and there was nothing.

A few others made comments, and to her surprise, they were comments that were more than not sympathetic, even understanding. Yet the pain still burned and she didn't know what it was, or what was causing it.

NITE OWL MODELING:

The other part of her, a far larger part than it really should have been in some ways and yet it was the price of her own actions, stood in a room doing a photoshoot.

A new one, this time, for a magazine that was interviewing her. She'd been asked to model a new kind of clothes, answering questions, and that was easy enough. Her head throbbed with a painful feeling, like a spike driven into her skull coated in acid and it was hard to focus at one level, but long experience in her other job meant that she could all the same. Her smile was warm and lovely, supernaturally so, as elements of her truer self shone out, but it did not mean that much. It was just weariness and that horrid pain in her head that burned in every element of her being.

Her hands felt warm, far, far warmer than usual, and where she did not notice that as much in the other part of her job she did here, when she held a cup of coffee for one of the other people in between shots when that one went to the bathroom and other places were full, and that person came back and actually jerked their hand back a bit, the coffee that had begun to become lukewarm heated back up. Most people believed that Raven's girlfriend, whom Didi was known to be, would not be anyone but a metahuman so nothing else was made of it besides a small bit of speculation on what her powers might be.

The day, so long and tedious and part of the mundane elements of her job passed, and she went to a cafe, one of her favorites, and ordered a drink. She did not eat, but she did drink, a quirk of her being that she had never quite deciphered, and had no real means nor reasons to decipher. When she had her tea, nice and warm and ready, a voice spoke to her.

"I remember you," it spoke in wonder. "Hazel was right. It is you."

She turned to see a woman in her early forties, time giving her some additional weight, but in a manner that fit her, made her feel more like a person and less like a fragile doll wielded and made into a thing of the pleasure and pleasures of others. There were streaks of grey in her hair, and she wore a pair of mom jeans and an off-shoulder sweater that fit her well and showed she'd lost nothing of her touches. Her eyes widened.

Foxglove, she spoke, and as Foxglove heard the voice she smiled sweetly.

"I know that voice, I remember it well."

Her face sobered immediately, leavened with fear.

"It's not our time yet, is it?"

Death shook her head. **_Not for a long time, if I have anything to say about it._**

Foxglove smiled.

"I see you have a girlfriend, now."

Death nodded.

"Hazel never did say what she spoke to you about, did she?"

Death shook her head.

_**There's a reason for that.** _

Foxglove's eyes looked her over. "I can guess some of it. And there's been those dreams, too. I'm going to guess that they're slightly more than just dreams, and that the tall guy in black we saw with the mop on his head back then, that he was much, much more than a dream."

Death's smile was awkward but the pain in her head throbbed worse and she brushed it and then gripped her head more firmly.

"You OK?"

_**Head's been hurting all day.** _

Foxglove reached out and gently put her hand on her shoulder. 

"I didn't know someone like you could get a migraine."

Death just whimpered though the pain eventually began to dull.

TITANS TOWER MEETING ROOM:

When she teleported back to Titans Tower, the pain that had dogged her all day was gone, and her vision was now woozy in a different sense as she adjusted to the aftermath. Hands that were warmer than usual, and a pain in her head. that had been powerful until it faded. She sighed.

Then Nightwing spoke to her directly and spoke words that she had not wanted to hear but had known, in the end, might happen.

"We learned from....one of your relatives....that someone's looking for you. Someone....unpleasant."

Which one? Her question was tremulous.

"Golden eyes and two shadows," said Vic. "Never met that one before, not that we can remember." Death stiffened.

 _ **Oh. Them. OK.**_ She didn't say much more.

"You've been doing well enough with training, but there's a difference between that and ah....other things...and you've been really, really good at that, too. So...."

Raven stood up and went to her. I tried to talk them out of it, I did.

To her surprise, Garfield Logan, the Titan she liked least, spoke to her as well. "I did too, for what it's worth. You're not really cut out for this, based on everything Raven's shown me in those books. I think this is a bad idea, but the two of us don't get a veto power against the rest of the team."

Death was speechless when Robin handed her something in between a golden compass and pocketwatch with a bright yellow T in it.

"Welcome to the Titans. You will need a codename."

Death groaned, and took the communicator, but otherwise said nothing.

RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

Death paused when Raven looked at her, self-conscious for a moment in the nightgown that Raven had surprised her by knitting for her personally*. It had taken her most of the last few months to do it. The gown was lovely and it surprised her given how much they enjoyed being together that it was one that was surprisingly able to blend form-fitting and modest. Raven had even told her that it was magicked to change with her body-size, so that as she got to full health she wouldn't outgrow it. It went just past her knees, was sleeveless, and had a white ankh sowed where her own would usually be (and she trusted Raven enough that when she slept she removed her ankh and kept it in her own nightstand, one that she shared whenever she slept in Raven's room, which was becoming more of a nightly thing as her weariness slowly faded).

Raven cocked her head and came closer to her and she prepared herself for Raven to speak further of the issue broached in that meeting, her decision to have Death become more active not merely in training but the being she'd never really wanted to be, but knew if she chose to press the matter that the command feather would do its thing and then she'd only remember what happened when its effects faded. Instead Raven moved closer to her and her hand, deceptively soft and strong with a grip of iron, lightly brushed Death's cheek as she made a whimper of contentment at the touch and the effects of it on that loneliness that had been veiled for so long and was now fading further, and faster.

 _Your face..._.mused Raven.

_**Yes?** _

_The lines are....they're gone._ She spoke with a soft whisper and Death, not sure entirely of what she'd see, padded cautiously to the mirror Raven had installed for when she did not wish to go to Nevermore. She looked at herself, she was still showing the signs of her ordeal from the previous months, slower, slight trembles in her limbs, but.....

Her hands flew to her face and she smiled, with a bright shine of light in her eyes.

**_You're right. They are gone._ **

Death smiled, and Raven smiled in turn, walking over to her with a more confident stride and putting her hands around her, her chin resting on Death's shoulder.

_This all started because you asked me to do one thing but it hasn't been just that. I do love you, Death. Not the concept you represent, nor the idea of dying, but you, the person. The older sister, the one shorter than me. The girl with the heart that has infinite room to love everyone and to love unconditionally, and who carried wounds for so long until you had a reminder that concept or not, you're still a person. I'm not her, I'm not your heart, but....._

Death squeezed her hand. _**That's a poetic thing, Rae.**_

Raven's nose twitched. She was not a fan of that nickname even from Death, but she would endure it, because where Gar meant it to annoy in retaliation for all the lasagna jokes, Death meant it as simple affection no different to her other nicknames and shortened names.

_**It refers to the time when we had our falling out, and to the irony that it was all based on a lie. I loved her, I did. Part of me still does, but the past is the past.** _

She bit her lip.

_**I think part of her has come back, somehow, and that disturbs me. I should know more than most if the dead walk, and I don't know. I don't know, and I don't know what I don't know.** _

Death smiled and took Raven's hand that had threaded into her own to her lips and kissed her knuckle, then Raven stiffened, and Death did too when she saw what she saw. A single strand of white in her otherwise-infinite darkness of her hair. Not knowing what it was and fearful of that for a moment, Death kissed Raven's knuckles again and curled up with her. Raven did not pressure her, in truth, as her previous lover had. She could say no, and it would be accepted. She could be hugged and loved even if someone knew who she was, and what she was, and that was wondrous.

PALACE OF DREAM OF THE ENDLESS, THE DREAMING:

Death found herself in the Dreaming, that night.

In Dream's palace, no less, before his throne.

**_A little theatrical, don't you think, little bro?_ **

Dream froze.

**Your hair......**

He descended from his throne to reach for her and Death pulled back a little. Old ghosts had stirred and the memory of another who had sprung at her like that with a blazing sword and eyes that blazed as brightly as the sword with intent to murder led to her reaction, which she recognized and flashed a sickly, apologetic grin to Dream about after the fact. Not that it helped, exactly. 

**I'm sorry.** I should have asked. **May I?**

She nodded, and his hand moved out to touch the streak.

**You're not Del, my sister. Your hair changing like this is.......**

He paused.

**I think the thing from the old universe is trying to change you.**

Death froze.

**_How?_ **

**I don't know. I......that's not why I called you here**

**I need to tell you something. The being that was your heart.....her soul was bound in the first book that appears in my library, against my will. I do not remember if this has happened before, but then there is no way that I could. The creature that talks about ending your function found a means into the Dreaming, into my forbidden shelves. She stole the book, and the Kinslayer lives. New body, same powers.**

Death froze, her eyes narrowing.

_**You mean to tell me you had her soul in your library the whole time? And you didn't think that was something I might have wanted to know?** _

Dream nodded.

Death's hand whipped around and Dream held his cheek in shock as Death shook her hand slightly.

_**That....she killed our sister, Dream! She nearly tried to kill me! She probably still thinks I'd drop everything and return to her!** _

Dream nodded.

 **I didn't know what to say, or how to say it. You comfort us, and you protect all of us, even Destiny. When it's you, we......we don't know. We don't know how, and it shames us that we don't. Secrecy comes easy when there's no knowledge**.

Death's anger stilled, and Dream saw in her eyes the searching elements in her gaze that made him understand why mortals feared her.

Then she surprised him by smiling and hugging him, before reaching up to kiss his cheek.

_**I can't fault you for trying to protect me, lil' bro. I understand that.** _

She looked at him, then caressed the same cheek she'd slapped.

_**I'm your big sister, and I understand that it's hard for you to try. If I hadn't broken the Source Wall the thing that crawled into your space wouldn't be there and this would never have happened. You can't be angrier at yourself than I am at myself. I made a big mistake, and I've let myself become distracted by everything with both kinds of work. With the luxuries I have because I'm not bound by the rules. It's easier when you have someone you love, who loves you the way you've always wanted to be. Selflessly, and able to selfishly enjoy being the one to be loved, for a change, not just the one loving others.** _

_**And there, I think.....** _

She paused.

Then her eyes narrowed.

_**Do you think she could be trying that rite?** _

Dream froze.

**That rite is only a thing of concept.**

Death pointed to herself and then to Dream.

_**Yes, as we all know a mere abstract concept is no more than a thought without any teeth to it.** _

Dream glared at her and she stuck her tongue out at him. She mused: 

_**Burgess didn't have the power to pull off his rite except that you were weak. i almost......I almost died, Dream. I almost actually really and truly died, and it turned out that for the first time, with the real power to do it, and something to live for that's not just....seeing all of you do so many of the same things and change in the same ways and being powerless to do more than comfort you when you need me, if that much, that I don't want to. I am fine with my existence, for the first time in several thousand universes. I've been able to do something really and truly new, Dream.** _

_**Is that....you know, I never asked you. Is that why you put yourself, and all of us, through that whole elaborate plan that ended with the Furies and everything with them?** _

Dream nodded. **Yes. Save that I could not change and stay the Dream you grew up with.**

Death smiled sadly. _**For a loose, very loose, sense of that. I've seen this so many times and I've gone to your realm and taken your hand so much that it blurs but I've never let myself ask why you'd do that. Why you asked me, why you were so....so close to me.**_

Dream nodded, and held his sister, who was trembling, slightly **. I did it because I needed to change. When I did, I became who I am now. I don't know what it must be like to endure all this time, to have a life that is truly a life and not these brief things. You have seen so much, you put up with all of our frustrations and what must become such infinite and mundane cycles, because you love us. You love us that much, and you do what you do, in the end, because you love life itself enough that it needs a loving hand at the dawn, and the twilight.**

 **I can't fathom that, sister**. And he leaned down to kiss her forehead in turn, as Death held him tighter. **It must be both beautiful and painful beyond words. To love so much and to be met with so much hate.**

**You have seen us for....a long time and we are just now beginning to understand this. I know you're hurting, sister. Why do you hurt this way? Why come back at all and not leave and leave the Presence to make a new you?**

Death looked at him with soft, sad eyes full of tears.

 _ **You're my family,**_ she said in a broken voice. Dream's arms became more firmly tied around her, and she felt that warmth that she had not felt from him in a very, very long time, far ancient and distant.

In his arms, Death made a vow to do something for the first time that she had not done in billions of years before the first life formed around the star Sol, ever since the blade that had struck in the first time and in the iterations of her family that followed had done the deed. She would go speak to Despair. 

CITADEL OF THE TEMPLE AZARATH:

The circle of items that would go into the ritual were but beginning to be formed, the Azar knew. It was no simple thing to rewrite the very soul of one of the Endless. For it one would need seven objects to bind and corral one of the seven. Given the nature of the Endless and how they transcended time and space, it was a thing that needed only the magic of the law of contagion. A lock of Perpetua's hair and with it another lock of the molten magma-hair of the being that was Death's heart. The heart and the blood, and in the center of the circle, the very sigil that would permit not merely power at the expense of the being that existed in this aeon, but the entire element that transcended universes.

_**Three of the seven gathered, four more to go.** _

The being smiled as she pondered the result. Cleanse the Endless of the curse of that which was death, and only Life would endure.

The ironic part was that Death would probably be grateful for the change and even able to truly enjoy life itself.

Then her face sobered. The command feather was a problem, and one that even she could not solve. A feather from her wings marked with the True name, written in Death's own blood (something she would need to get her hands on as the last item, though that part would be relatively simple when it came to it). The power in that construct was awe-inspiring, and the byzantine traps within it were such that a sufficient brute force to smash it was simple enough, if one wished the utter unmaking of all life and Death herself with it. Not the kind of triumph she wished.

Even if the other four items were gathered, absent the feather, the command feather presented her with a problem she could not so easily resolve. Death's heart might exist independent of her and in the form of the monster that had given the sigil the marring, but there was another that held her very being captive.

The Endless might see it as slavery, but she had a feeling, though an unproven one, that as the daughter of Darkness proved more dangerous than the father across worlds and realities, that the pattern might again assert itself.

Her eyes narrowed. Then she shrugged. Her mind was not all that it could have been across nearly one and a half millennia of growing in power and majesty beyond the wildest imaginings of beings at one level, and due to her ability to go beyond time altogether being ancient of days and new as the morning dew at the same time as well. It was paranoia, leavened with the anger that the Raven of the Prime Earth had defied her dictates and stubbornly continued to exist, and that the Raven of the realm that had seen the World-Tree had found a means around that path she had laid. She shrugged again, and chose to will herself back to the Earth, her eyes following a clash of Yuga Khan and Perpetua over the ruins of Earth-X, where the Nazis had won and where she'd laid it low such that it could not exist. 

Yuga Khan was the mightiest of all the New Gods and it showed. He'd dragged Perpetua to this realm where his powers could work unhindered, and the monster that raved of love for a mother that knew little of her errant daughter and wished to know still less than that was flattened by another demonstration of the Khan's power over time and space itself. She smiled, coldly, and moved on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *In the Teen Titans cartoon Raven literally does knit for a hobby so.....


	6. Night's Plutonian Shore:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before she goes to see Despair, Death decides to show Raven how much she loves her with her body.

RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

The day had been an ordinary one. Blissfully so, given everything in the day that preceded it. Tomorrow, she was going to see Despair, to confront the sister she'd been estranged from for the last few billion years, a conversation that had been necessary since, in truth, the incident that had traumatized them both. Her emotional maelstrom had subsided somewhat after more time working. The white streak in her hair remained constant, and there was no head pain today. She walked across worlds and gave comfort to those who needed it and waited through the hostility of those who raged against the dying of the light.

One thing that did pain her more than slightly, though in this case emotionally, was that in the first of the worlds of the Fifty-One worlds, the recovery of her strength was reaching a point where those sadists who dwelt in a supposed asylum that really served more as a quasi-jail and quasi-rest home for a specific cadre of supervillains were starting to break loose again, sensing certain changes, and slaking their more malevolent impulses. There had been a really horrid case in Earth-7 where the local version of the Joker had gotten loose with blade and Joker venom and smilex, and she'd had to see the aftermath and to help those taken. The Joker, to her still greater discontent, knew that she was there. He had always been able to see her, and even to hear her, in every single world. Even when she was some thousands of miles away.

She ignored him, but it was never easy, even if he could not threaten her. He reminded her all too much of a more nihilistic Thanos.

That had been the worst, though she was able to give the breath of life to multiple objects, and to bless new ideas that formed. There was something that disturbed her more than slightly, her power and her focus as Life always gave her something of a great rush of contentment, knowing that she sustained new things as well as ending old ones. For the first time, her function tilted more in the direction of one than the other, the elements of Life meant the heat in her hands became a soothing coolness, and it felt right in a way that the other half of her function did not. 

She'd stared at her hands and into a pool of water for a long time that evening, not certain what that meant, or if it was simply a case of noticing something that wasn't quite there to notice. It reminded her more than slightly of the incident with Luthor and the child of the Phantom Zone, but that wasn't quite right. And she did not think it was a coincidence that this was the day after a white streak appeared in her hair, and that gave her more chills.

The Titans had had an ordinary day, one safe enough that their girlfriends had come over to the Tower for a barbecue. Death had returned about a half-hour before the food was ready, waving to Sarah, Tim, and Iris, as both Raven and Kori waved to her in turn. She was both quiet and subdued, not certain just what was happening with her, or to her, and where in other contexts uncertainty would have seemed a heady drug......

Raven noticed she was quiet and invited her to cuddle with her and she gracefully accepted, curling into her and watching Sarah and Victor blending playing video games and doing an impromptu duet of a few songs that Death recognized and found Vic a surprisingly good singer. Donna Troy was noting at length about an ex-boyfriend of hers.

Terry Long was a man about fifteen years her senior, and a professor at her college. He'd seduced Donna fairly quickly in spite of having a more than moderate paunch and a unibrow, and burping enough to seem an inferior knock-off of Rick Sanchez, because Donna was young, new to Man's World, and completely insecure about herself in spite of very little reason to be. It had been a dreadful relationship, one that most of the Titans had bit back views on because Donna seemed happy. Raven had been an exception and her cutting issues with Terry had led to some fairly spectacular arguments where Long had come up short.

Eventually Terry had run afoul when insisting on going on a Titans mission of the rampaging Doomsday, who had returned yet again (at some point Raven needed to ask Death how exactly the unkillable Doomsday would or could come to her given that seemed impossible but that was neither here nor there). Death had met him then. She loved everyone, it was both her blessing and her curse. Some were harder to love than others, and she was at her very most professional when Terry Long had tried to seduce her and politely stepped aside from him trying to grope her. Death smiled amused, and even relieved to see that Donna's standards had grown, even if she was more than slightly surprised to hear her talking to calmly about Jason Todd. Another of the heroes Death remembered well and one of the few to whom she had given the breath of light and gone near the unpleasantness of the Lazarus Pits to do so.

The Pits did not bring back the dead, in a fuller sense, only she could do this, and with some, as with the eco-terrorist, she did so only on the wisdom of her elder brother.

Death mewed slightly at the warmth of Raven's body, and felt content, in a way that she had not.

That evening, after the others had gone with their lovers (and Garfield, in this case, had taken Jillian with him, as he and Raven were enjoying one of their intermittent breaks for which Death was grateful given what she planned tonight), Death's quiet conversation with Raven from earlier bore fruit when they got to her room. The feathers remained in the wards on the wall, though her clipped wing was indeed healing. The gangrene and ossification were gone and she could feel new feathers growing, small bumps that extended from her wings now. She was healing, slowly but surely, and the ability of her job to grow and reality to slowly but straightforwardly seem to course-correct was a part of that.

Raven was on the bed, casually flaunting her loveliness, reclining as her hand scrawled patterns on the sheets. Death finished removing her top, her sigil in her nightstand. Her wings were invisible, and she stood back, looking at Raven, drinking in the body and the presence of her love, who'd tied her favorite strap-on, the one that worked more like a physical penis than not due to magic, on. She knew that this one could in theory impregnate people (which was a reason why Raven never used it with Kori or any women she was with unless she was sure there was no risk of making them pregnant). They had not used protection or any kind of spell for the last few months, and Death enjoyed both the amusement and the conceit. She was Life as well as Death, and she was a mother each time something new came into being.

She kept her smile carefully there as the thought of Perpetua and her rampage and clash with Yuga Khan briefly flickered across her mind, That was irrelevant, in any event.

She sauntered over to Raven, whose casual smirk showed that Pride was more than slightly in the ascendancy, as did the shadows that seemed to grow as they drank in the darkness with the eyes upon eyes upon eyes flashing into existence with fanged smiles that hissed and sang songs in a demonic chorus that was oddly beautiful. The darkness rose and grasped her body, part of it intertwining around her arms that were pulled over her head, others of it spreading her legs and sinking into the bed as Raven levitated herself up, Death fidgeting slightly as the teeth caressed her body (but did not break the skin) and the eyes were little pools of fire and the darkness an icy chill.

She wanted this and she felt her arousal as much as Raven did, wetness dripping between her legs. She'd wanted this, in truth, since Raven had shifted slightly during their cuddling session and their bodies had reached a particular position where she could just....feel what was there, and how it was there. As Raven looked to her and she bit her lips, nodding, Raven slipped in, her right hand threading through some of Death's hair, her left brushing the edge of the white streak. Death's eyes rolled in her head slightly as Raven began to move her hips, her teeth lengthening into fangs as her jaws spread wider, and then she leaned down to bite Death's shoulder, an act that left, albeit temporary, bite marks on her shoulder and left Death feeling that coursing heat of her own emotions surging into Raven's in a pattern that offered no ready definition if any had been so bold as to ask.

It was a thing far beyond her expectations, emotions that spiraled into each other, the sense of blending into all of this sending energy that looked like nothing so much as a kaleidoscope produced by someone tripping the most potent acid known, interspersed with the sensations of the darkness that intertwined around her body and gave it heat and cold and kisses that tickled and bites that nipped. She may have been Endless and in the past uncertain that the her that was here could be bound or matched, thus, but now she didn't care.

This was something she never thought she'd have, lips attentive to her body, her being quivering under physical and empathic and telepathic pleasure that kept her at an escalating spiral of conquest she felt in her very marrow. This was her, this was who she was to Raven and this was what she was to Raven. Not the cold and unfeeling monster Desire saw her as, not someone required to be any one concept or any one person, just an embodiment of physical-psychic-empathic-demonic-Endless force that whirled in a spiral that ended in her first orgasm within three thrusts of Raven, who smirked and amplified her thrusts, seeing Death's quivering amplified in tune with the way her hands brushed her most sensitive spots, the way her lips bit at Death's own, the way her teeth stroked parts of her body like a rasp interspersed with a knife and Death squealed.

Once, not so long ago in truth, Raven had been a depersonalized thing, a Gem, a rasp wielded by the aggressive hands of a demonic force to batter its way into a world and drown it in fires to match those of what her captors/mentors in the Temple Azarath had taught her, and what her father aspired to be. Then she'd erased him in white fire and now she was able to give, at least in part, something of what she'd felt on that day when she'd caught the hand destiny had intended to give her and hurled it back with metronomic force.

The Death who writhed beneath her and ached to hold her and was held down by her fanged and multi-eyed and twisting shadows, she was like her. She viewed herself by a function she did, but it was not all of who she was. A personification she might be, but she had outlived multiple universes and came back and slotted herself into a role when she was no longer technically born in truth, and let herself live life as she lived it to be with and for a family that was as dysfunctional as her own. This was a woman who knew her own struggles at one level more than she could ever imagine knowing, and this was someone she'd come to love, and now she was a mess, a continual echoing sound from her that was only halted when Raven casually summoned a tendril akin to those she wielded in her constructs, her powers growing since the events with the command feather.

The tendril slid into Death's mouth and she welcomed it, as Raven let herself move, her bed reinforced with wards against friction to prevent more of the various small fires that she, and others who used speed past a point absent the shielding of the Speed Force or the ways Kryptonian physics worked under yellow suns. Death could take everything she could do in a way nothing else she knew could, she was free to unleash the full measure of her strength. She'd found balance between Pride, daughter of Trigon, and Rachel Roth, daughter of Arella.

The degree to which her skin shifted from pale to red to pink between moments and thrusts and which the darkness shifted in turn and moved and pulsed in unity with the rest of her, in the elements where her nails were claws in hands red as blood, where they moved along Death's body and where her body had small spikes that brushed with the speed in a sense that left Death hovering on the edge of her sister's realm, her sister closing her eyes and ears and not needing at all to see this or to see her sister in such a state. As Death hovered still closer to the edge, Del grabbed Barnabas and trotted off to loiter near a really fancy building with a name that puzzled her. Ar-kham.

She shrugged. There were a few here who were well within her realm but most claimed to be and weren't. Many times she'd thought about giving the ones who made the claim but lied a taste of who she was. With a happy smile on her face and whistling ice cream, Delirium of the Endless strode into Arkham Asylum and stayed there for several hours. When the strange girl with the rainbow hair and the talking dog left, Gotham had a streak where the brief return of the Rogues ended in a resurgence of generic ordinary crimes, as the Rogues lost to the touch of Delirium of the Endless were stuck in truthful delirium and it took them a couple of months to break out of it.

With this as a backdrop, Raven shifted the shadows enough that Death's lower legs gripped the lower edge of hers, and those on Death's arms moved enough that her arms formed a quasi-circular pattern, while reaching around to ensnare Death's hands, Death's next orgasm gripping them both in a spasm of bliss that left them both making incoherent sounds, her hips continuing to move. She took a great pleasure in leaving Death incoherent and a twitching mess, funding in this both an element of her deeper nature as the daughter of Trigon, and a sense of relief, as the internal maelstrom that consumed Death when she had too much time to think stilled and she rested and healed better. The blend of her more human and Azarathi nature and her more demonic meant that it became its own part of the feedback loop and left her nearly as incoherent as Death when all was said and done, as she felt the strap-on beginning to throb and pulse like the cock it was enchanted to resemble. 

Death's bleary-eyed nod was her granting consent again, the symbol agreed on for yes (as an empathic pulse was that of a no that nothing could override in haste), as Raven gripped the sheets harder and then had every reason to be grateful that her wards were as mighty as they are, for if they were not, her room would have been afire from the sheer speed of her motions, the tendril in Death's mouth releasing a vast quantity of liquid she drank down without spilling a drop, smiling smugly at Raven, as her enjoyment of her Endless physiology getting one on the demon wasn't counterbalanced in the least by Raven's long forked tongue snaking out and caressing her face.

Death grinned, welcoming the tongue into her mouth, and then as Raven came inside of her her body jerked enough that she came near to passing out, Raven smirking with a smug look at her as she slid off.

_Yet another round to me._

Death looked at her exhausted, and then her own smile became more roguish.

**_Do you ever wonder what I look like in Earth-Three?_ **

Raven cocked her head.

_**There, the villains win and the heroes lose. Someone who looks like me would have too hard a time there, so there I and all my siblings take on a shape fitting a world hard and brutal.** _

With that Death picked up Raven by one hand and then shifted in size to seem to become at least twice that of a normal being being, as her eyes transformed to stars that burned with a brilliant light.

_**Incidentally, this is also the form that wears a suit of armor and rides a pale horse.** _

Her smile now had fangs to match Raven's own, and Raven stared, blankly.

_**You've been on top for the last......months, every time we've been together. My turn now, please?** _

The last word was quiet, and a bit of a contradiction with the form that towered over Raven in height and bulk, but Raven nodded with a grin of amusement and anticipation at the same time.

With that she was hurled onto her bed as Death compressed the shape that Earth-Three saw to the size of hers seen elsewhere, the form stalking onto the bed and pulling Raven into a deep kiss that Death easily dominated, holding Raven's wrists as Raven hummed into her lips, and the two separated their kisses with Raven looking at Death in amazement tinged with a more than slight degree of awe, as Death held her wrists in a grip simultaneously that of a single hand of her own size and that of the gigantic form she had briefly glimpsed, and she recognized that this was the form she'd summoned against Adonis with a look of shock.

Death broke the kiss and then slid herself on top of Raven's face, holding her had and groaning as she enjoyed that Raven began to eat her out with as much skill as she expected her own lovers to show, her long demonic tongue and the ways her hands worked on Death's ass and thighs something that interspersed with a slightly different but no less real empathic feedback. Death's hands slid along Raven's body. She loved the way her lover looked, the way her shadows lit by the demonic lights she summoned interwove with the paleness of her skin and the sensations of Death's hands wandering along her body.

The strangeness of her day at work faded and she felt balanced when her hands caressed every inch of Raven's body, the curves of her breasts, which she kneaded and squeezed, the tautness of her stomach where no inch remained unmarked, the wondrous striations of her pelvis, things that had Death drooling, the blend of firmness and softness of her inner thighs.

Raven was moaning in response to her touches and though she could not see Death's impish smirk, her empathy read it, as Death lazily teased her with one hand and with a quick demonstration of her strength in a move that was meant purely to underscore what she could do versus what would work more, she lifted up Raven's leg and slapped her ass as Raven jolted slightly. Death's smirk intensified, and she resumed leaning forward, cooing in response to the feelings of Raven's lips and tongue as she continued to tease her lover, Raven quivering.

Death's grin became slightly more devilish (Raven spanked her hard for that pun, then pinched her ass for good measure as Death giggled) and she then began to finger Raven, deliberately stretching out the time, extending her pleasure and her exploration of just how readily responsive Raven could be. The twitches in her legs and the sounds muffled in Death's pussy, as she stretched in an almost cat-like fashion, a low, shuddering moan echoing from her mouth indicated that answer and it goaded her further. Death soon bent down and pressed her lips to join her hand, and the two women felt the empathic buildup crescendo to a point where when they came out of the haze of orgasmic bliss the position of the stars wheeling near Raven's room indicated they'd spent two hours lost in that time, not that they registered this but vaguely, Death pulling Raven into her and being the big spoon for a night, Raven purring in a very Kori-like sound. 

That night Death slept soundly, as did Raven. It was after nine thirty in the morning that both woke up and Raven gave Death a strong kiss as she prepared to go down for a late breakfast.

_You've got this. Maybe you'll be surprised in a good way._

Death looked at herself in the mirror, stroking the white streak with concern. Raven floated back over to her and put her own hand on the streak, carefully prying Death's hand off of it.

 _I know that streak isn't a good thing. Believe me, if anyone knows that sort of stuff about magically induced hair change being a case of shit hitting the fan, I'm the one. Touching it and worrying about it won't make it better and it's not something we can control or fix until we start figuring out what it is. Talk to your sister and when we're back, we'll try to see something of what might be going on._

Death nodded, and they kissed once more and then she picked up a hook, and spoke the words: ** _Sister, I stand in my gallery and I hold your sigil. May I go to you?_**

Her sister's sigil and portrait gleamed and girding herself with a visible gulp, Death walked through the painting into Despair's realm. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory Fuck Terry Long and Marv Wolfman's idea that fostering him on the audience was anything remotely acceptable here.


	7. "I am Despair, and all who Despair are me."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death goes to the realm of Despair to talk. 
> 
> Black Adam tries to understand what manner of monster fell from the sky into his kingdom.

THE REALM OF DESPAIR:

Death had enjoyed seeing her sister, once. In that time she had been the first Despair, of a more human coloration, more like Del or Destruction or Destiny than like her. Like this, save that her body was marked through with lines of red as achingly crimson as Raven's own light. Each time she saw this iteration of her sister there was sorrow for she knew, as she returned to existence to bear her burden, that this Despair of the Endless was to prove the least Endless of the Endless. And each time, since that first universe, a version of that first murder of an Endless echoed. A monster of lava and fire that howled in rage and menace toward Desire and impaled her sister and then lunged toward her, though the vision failed at that point and she didn't remember much for a time, after.

A time where her function had wavered and chaos had ensued, if not as totally as when she'd left it. In the first universe. In others there was a single wrenching moment of agony that didn't fit into everything but she had no way to know. She assumed in all honesty that it was who murdered her sister and how and why. Desire standing in his form as a him, and staring in blank horror and falling to his knees and wailing, the only time she'd known Desire to act in this way, even when Destruction had left. Despair's realm had changed, it had become clammy and malodorous, the rats larger and menacing, the largest near-human sized and walking on two legs and hissing in a thing very like speech and yet not. The monsters for when Despair was at a greater size, the despair of universes and of crises.

She didn't see them, only flashes of their presence in her sister's thought.

Despair turned toward her.

 _Sister,_ she said simply, in a quiet, neutral voice.

Death found a chair provided, perhaps by her sister's will, and pulled it to her and sat on it.

Despair, ** _I......._ **she paused. **_I don't know where to begin so I'll start with the simplest. I am sorry. I've not been the best sister to you._ **

Despair shrugged, likely, worrying at her jaw with her hook, then spoke, the hook now digging into her right shoulder.

_I can understand. It's not easy to lose a sister and someone you loved, the latter for murder and then to see your sister rebuilt as her own murderer._

Death nodded. _**It's not just to you, it's never been.** _

Despair shrugged again.

_What is fairness, sister? What is just and who defines what that term means? Mortals do not always see or understand our gifts. Mine is an especial weight, sorrow and hope at the same time, for each goes with the other. Absent hope my function has no meaning._

She could not smile but the feeling that pervaded her realm was the closest that she could come to it, and her voice was laden with irony as thick as the stench of her realm. _If only the Blue Lantern Corps knew who created the entity that gave them their power, no?_

Death shrugged lightly. **_Better yours than mine. The.....the Life entity, another one of my....children. I really wish it had given them a better name than the White Lanterns. That's just...no._ **

Despair shrugged again.

**_I have left you more isolated than you should be, especially when he left. Death's voice was soft. It was easier to blame you, and myself, than to try to be sisters again. And to be angry at you for your games, as with Desire and Del, with the mortals rather than to try to understand you and why you did those things._ **

Despair shrugged yet again.

_It happens. I understand grief more than most._

Death nodded.

Silence filled the realm for a time and then Despair spoke:

_I am sorry you see her face when you see me._

Death leaned forward, head in her hands.

Despair looked, knowing that Death's face pervaded a few of her mirrors and sought to reach out when she froze.

_White?_

Death didn't really hear her at that point, until she felt Despair's hand brushing the white streak.

 _Why is there white in your hair?_ Despair's voice had a strange emotion in it, one that she did not recognize nor did Death, not then. A mixture of anger and worry, something that Despair had not felt since her first incarnation, save in the more petulant senses when her smaller games failed.

_**I don't know. I had a terrible headache and then this was there. And.....it feels better, now, to do my function with the breath of life, than it does to be the divider of the after.** _

Despair was silent for a moment, a very long moment, then she moved her hand to Death's chin, holding it up by two of her own fingers, as their eyes met. 

_Is it supposed to be like that?_

Death shook her head. ** _No. No more than hope is for you. Both are who I am. If I felt the divider of the after was more in the ascendant I'd be just as......._**

Despair nodded.

_This isn't you, sister. I think...._

She mused. _Whatever force resurrected my slayer must have a hand in this._

Death nodded.

Despair waked toward her, the rats moving aside, and laid a hand comfortingly on her shoulder.

_We'll make it through, sister. You may have been distant to me in other ways but you are in my mirrors all the time. Moreso than Desire I know what's in your heart, and why it's there. You have more than yourself to fight for, now. If that means I see you in my mirrors less, good. It's better for you that way._

Death gave her a sad smile and then reached up and hugged her tightly, the first hug that Despair had received from her sister since long before the parliament. The last time Despair remembered this was not long before Death had thrown her sigil aside and left her function and all of them. That had been the hug of someone who expected she would never come back nor be wanted. This......this was the kind of sisterly embrace that only Destruction had given her and in that, Despair hugged Death back and took into herself some of the burdens that laid on her sister's heart, murmuring Not alone into her ear several times until Death rested more easily, understanding the words as well as hearing them.

With that sad smile on her face, Death strode toward her gallery, and vanished through the portrait. Raven was waiting, and she was right.

PALACE OF TETH-ADAM, KHANDAQ CITY:

Black Adam stared in bemusement at the monster that had fallen from the sky and which he and Osiris had moved with a surprising amount of difficulty, the thing weighing more than it seemed and it seemed hefty enough. The creature had arrived with a horrid wound in the chest area and its heart visibly beating in its chest, the blood pouring from it a horrid molten thing. He'd wondered at first if it was an ifrit, for they of all the Djinn were the most fire-like and the ones closest to the shadowy things of the north that were only loosely kin to them. Then his eyes were drawn to the sword with the ornate whirling patterns and strange runes of non-human nature. They were thick and blocky things, vaguely akin to Chinese characters.

This had given him pause and he'd gone to his library and found the only symbols loosely akin to these, though still cruder and much more primitive-seeming. He'd pinched his chin then, uncertain. It was close, but not quite, and the last time a thing from another universe had landed in his dimension it had risen in a pseudo-fascist black outfit and bellowed about eating life and shitting skulls until he'd put it down for good. This didn't seem to be quite like that. The wound he did recognize, Diana's weapon, the Godkiller A weapon that up to now had lived up to the name perfectly. The thing's heart that beat that molten blood healed as he mused in his library, and the flesh began to stitch together slowly.

Teth-Adam remained confused, as the only thing that could match this kind of power was the maelstrom of heat that had fallen from the sky and fought, of all things, one of Superman's enemies and had so lopsided a battle that it was even the talk of the villain communities. That kind of thing was up Diana's alley in the most perfect sense and her Godkiller had been made for precisely that kind of foe and yet this thing lived, though not in the greatest conditions. A name echoed from its mouth, in what was its version of a whisper and he'd pondered that, too. Hel. The name of the Germanic Goddess of the Dead, but one of the many faces of the eldest sister of the Seven, the primordial concepts that underlined and shorted up reality.

A thing wounded in an attempted killing by Diana's sword, already unheard of. The monster murmuring the name of the Goddess of the Dead....he knew the sword from symbolism mentioned to him by the Wizard in the old days, and went to one of his oldest texts. The Al-Azif, in its original Arabic, one of the volumes called simply 'The Seven.'

In a legend concerning the sordid history of Despair, Desire, and Death an image of the scabbard was there, and it was the same blade. But....that was impossible. The weapon that had murdered one of the Endless and come close to murdering another was lost to time with the transformation of the murderer into another Endless, so had spoken Abdul Hazred, who knew much of the deep things (the volume on the Demon Trigon and the prophecy of the Gem had been a fascinating joke until the day he and his people had become stone and the titan had risen and remade the world, if briefly, in his image and in his likeness. Since then he'd taken all of the legends in this volume seriously). The blade that had burned the face of Death, slain Despair, and torn the heart of Death in twain....that blade _was physically in his dungeon and the monster that was in that golden armor was a perfect mirror to the slayer of the Endless, the Death-Bane who **had come closest of anything living to murdering Death herself.**_

**_In his dungeon._ **

Blinking, Teth-Adam moved with a swift speed, only to realize he'd dawdled too long on the luxury of dawning horror.

The thing that had fallen unconscious was healed and had snapped the chains that had sought to fetter her. Her eyes burned liked coals, then like bonfires. 

She spoke not in Khandaqi Arabic but in pure Khemetic, of the oldest days.

**_You have the stink of Shazam upon you._ **

Her voice was surprisingly high for a being that was a gigantic mass of lava with only the shape of her hair a loose clue as to what she seemed like when she was more humanoid.

**_I thought the old fart would keep trying to hold the heavens like that one fool from the Hellenic spheres. It seems he's wised up._ **

Her tone was insolent and mocking, and he realized that the wound from the Godkiller had fully healed.

His eyes were drawn to the broken breastplate in her armor and she saw that and tracked where he stared and smiled again.

**_She won't allow me to die, little boy. I don't think that applies equally to your kind._ **

Then she raised herself to her feet, preparing to leave, and smirked as she blew him a mocking kiss.

**_For your grace in allowing me the time to heal from bleeding from a heart savaged by a blade of the Greeks._ **

She vanished in a swirling bubble of fire and he found himself frozen in place for a moment by the impression of just what he'd faced. Then he sighed, heavily. 

It pained him, always, to have to do this, but he was going to have to do it. He would have to contact the Justice League to let them know just what kind of monster was on the loose. The thing that had murdered one of the seven underpinnings of reality and come near to exterminating all life itself when the blade in that scabbard had shattered the heart of Death and come near to unmaking her was free, his face twitching slightly with the thought. He really hoped they didn't think this was merely another thing like the Doomsday monster of Krypton.

Pulling up an old communications device from a time when he'd literally been _on_ the League, he entered in an old code, and waited for the comms to hail him into the Watchtower.

By a perfect stroke of fortune it was Wonder Woman herself who greeted him when he did, and that meant he was relieved. Of them all, she would come closest to understanding just what was going on.

LENORE CAFE, SIMONE AVENUE:

Raven munched on her mint-berry scone, not caring about her dignity or indeed about table manners. She was hungry, after a long day when her appetite had been dulled by worry about and for her love. The streak of white in her hair made her fearful, much moreso than she'd let on. The worst part was that it reminded her of the elements of the Blackest Night and the thing that had been revealed, the Life Entity. In the Necronomicon's volume on the Seven, the Life Entity was called the eldest child of Death, which made a great deal of sense after seeing her give the breath of life. If that meant what she thought it did, there were new problems and they would have to be dealt with, in a very swift fashion, if it was within them to do so. 

Her love materialized a bit away from the cafe in an alley that she knew had nobody within it, for Death could sense where Life was, and walked toward her with, to her great relief, a set of mixed emotions the bulk of which tilted positive, and positive answers to her questions. Thoughts of the menace of the white streak and of its elements faded in the wake of the quiet words spoken. Even the brief excerpt of a ranting speech from 'Azar' could not disrupt it. Though it made her still more thoughtful, especially when she turned her head and then her eyes widened. 

Azar wore a ceremonial robe with a sigil she'd remembered from the priestess, her adoptive mother in all but name, Azar's trove of sigils back in the day, A two-headed dragon with the right head gnawing at the left, her robes dark green in the front with a very bright, almost neon blue at the back. She remembered the sigil, though she had never known the name of the thing that was attached to it. Then as she heard a line in the rant:

_**Every sacred dream made real in the most truthful form, the mirrors of the soul.** _

For a single moment, there had been not one voice that spoke but two, and she realized now why that single voice had seemed so familiar, for when paired with its second counterpart, a thundering thing of wrath and ruin, it was the voice of a thing she _had_ seen before.

The giant with the world-tree that had told her:

**_You have given me the sledgehammer._ **

Death looked at her curiously, then her eyes were drawn to the same rant and to the same sigil. Death's face became icy and cold and she said nothing and Raven was quiet likewise.


	8. The Reapers and the Eighth Circle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the Azar's plan grows, Yuga Khan emerges triumphant over Perpetua only to encounter an unexpected guest on their battlefield. 
> 
> Highfather and Darkseid's scheme to overthrow Yuga Khan draws nigh, and the murderer of Despair goes to Gotham City for the fun of it.

THE SOURCE WALL:

Long-since shattered by the Khan and Perpetua, the Wall that had kept various horrors out of this portion of the Multiverse had sundered, and keen eyes were drawn. Eyes that had wondered how a portion of the broader multiverse linked beyond all else to the person and the nature of Kal-El, last son of Krypton, had forestalled the endless devouring hunger of that thing that sits on a Gilded Throne and seeks to end death that all may long for it and never die and writhe in the endless torments of dreams become nightmares that never end. She had found a means around the Wall, the first time, and then had neatly been repulsed by Herculean efforts and the power of the Highfather and the Spectre.

Now the Wall was sundered and the fuller power that had been there in the first had returned with vengeance on her mind, vengeance and the gloating nature of the twisted mockery of the Oath coded into her great empire. She was not the only entity that strode in through the devastated wall. Another was drawn in by the devastation, by curiosity, and by sheer amusement. She had already come in the past and present to Earth TT-X, in the wake of a great clash between the Justice Lords and the Justice League and proven an Outside Context Problem to them that they could neither halt nor slow down. Now, simultaneously and in the future, she was here, in the Promethean Galaxy connected to Earth-48, walking on the interstellar medium and studying the sundered wall.

Casual wielding of smoke infused with lightning had undone the ivory and gold spiderwebbed into the Wall, the tacit attempt to provide a backuip plan in the even that things failed once more. The being that strode on the surface was a seemingly human woman of dark brown skin with flowing dark hair, save that her eyes burned as golden stars, and save the presence of a black ankh around her neck. And save that she strode the interstellar medium clad in nothing but a light sundress, with her very presence seeming to distort and being light around her much as a star did in spacetime.

Her teeth changed from human-like to serrated fangs as she parsed the traces of the statue that had shattered, and felt an energy familiar and yet alien. The sunfires dimmed slightly from her eyes narrowing and then in a sudden apparition as if a mirage met with the vision of true-sight her power grasped her in an embrace as water does a blade, and she willed herself to a new realm.

NISHADRO, FURTHEST OUTPOSTS OF THE MILKY WAY:

Perpetua was on her knees, now. The Yuga Khan of Apokolips had drained her with the fight's continuance, siphoning off her own energy. Her greatest attacks at most got grunts, where his told with progressively greater force. Entire planets were drained dry and glorified deserts filled with bones, now. Among them this one, a civilization just beneath that of Colu, and only a level beneath that of Oa. Its inhabitants had last faced the New Gods in the era of the Yuga Khan's rule when his armies had fought that of the Highfather of that time, though the Highfather then had forgotten just how powerful the Yuga Khan's powers were and let himself drain himself to nothingness.

Now, Perpetua, daughter of Death herself, creation of the Ankh and the Wall-in-formation, a being who had reaved several hundred worlds to fight him, was drained as the first Highfather had been. The Khan sneered at her.

**_I am the mightiest of the New Gods, mightier than any wielder of the Alpha or the Omega Effect. Even the Spectre and the demon Trigon knew and know my name and fear me. You are the child of the mightiest of the Endless, but you are a spoiled brat who has no understanding of your powers. You are weak, Perpetua, you were always weak, and that is why my power restrained you._ **

The Khan smiled coldly.

He raised his hands and the power of the very Source itself gleamed.....and in that instance Perpetua's eyes blazed with darkness that was not of her make but of the being she called her mother's. In that instance she was no longer the being she'd imagined herself to be but briefly showed the fullness of her inheritance as one of the Endless, as the child of the End of All Things, and her own power and prowess erupted out like a bow-shock against the Khan's power derived from the very Source itself, and the backlash ripped into both their flesh, leaving Perpetua unconscious, and the Khan on his knees.

Applause greeted them and they saw a giant in dark green armor with a neon-blue cape and eyes that gleamed with the light of murdered stars.

_**Well done, Yuga Khan.** _

Her gaze turned to Perpetua.

 ** _I did not awaken you, child, to see you burn half a galactic arm down in a rampage and a clash with the Khan. You are as disappointing to me as you are to your mother._** With that her fist clenched and a sudden gripping sensation caused Perpetua to scream in agony and to fall unconscious as she turned to the Khan, who froze. Froze, then smiled and called upon the power that made his fists gleam like twin stars lit by the hallowed power that knelt before him in a way even Highfather could not match.

_**DeSaad told me that you were banished not so long ago by the power of the Source.** _

The monster smiled.

**_The Wall that was too great for you and for her alike was meant to keep my kind out and yet I found a means of ingress regardless. That left me subject, however loosely, to your realm and to its laws enough that the forces of your dimension could actively harm me. I am not of your worlds or of your clime or of your spaces. My legacy is Azarath, a place beyond all others, a place that no mere force of power can consume forever, as it will always rebuilt itself and draw others to the vision and the dream I give, those who will not care about the.....technicalities._ **

She turned to the Khan, towering over him easily, the Khan's eyes drawn to the lack of a shadow as she moved toward him with confidence, undeterred by the power of the Source energy he was wielding augmented by Perpetua's own powers.

**_Now I am obedient to none of your laws, only my own, unconstrained as I have not been since last she came to my halls, when she was in her fledgling status in this universe and once again fell into the pattern to lay down her burden for a time and to shape the fabric of Death and of Life in this universe. Then she grasped, at the end, what it was that sought her friendship and how such a being could behold an Endless uncaged and do so without fear._ **

Her eyes glowed with the light of murdered stars as she leaned down toward the Khan, her dish-like face with its sagittal crest drawn into a great leer.

_**So go ahead, try to wield the power that worked on a being reliant on elements of your world on one no longer bound by those laws. You have more than exceeded my expectations, and she has surpassed my lowest for her. A being spawned by Death herself, and all she does upon awakening is seek to burn the galaxy and drown it in fire. And you?** _

Her right gauntlet flashed with Unlight. 

_**As I said, try it.** _

The Khan, never a being of great patience or subtlety, and goaded beyond his limited endurance by the taunts of the goddess before him unleashed a bolt of the Source's power that collided with her like a bolt and a prominence from a great star, the light so blinding that Perpetua's exhausted form sank into the recesses of a deep slumber from proximity to it. When the light faded, the Azar smiled with a horrid grin that made the Khan audibly gasp.

_**I warned you, obedient to no laws but that of my kind, of the kind of beings that hunt and slay the kind of creatures that match the power of your Spectre for sport! In universe after universe I pursued the Demon Trigon, and in most I take form in a more immaterial guise, stripping the soul of the demon's bastard daughter from her flesh and wielding her immense powers to eradicate her father's soul. In this one and in the others like it, she does it** _

With that the Unlight ripped out in a bolt to match that hurled at her and in a great sound like the tearing of the fundamental fabric of the universe, Yuga Khan was hurled backwards and fell, his chest smoking and a great wound ripped into it.

Uncaring, the Azar turned to Perpetua and lifted her in a telekinetic grip.

**_What to do with you? She won't come for you, she never wanted you regardless._ **

The Azar mused.

Then with a terrible smile she snapped her fingers and Perpetua found herself awoken in a nightmarish fever dream where she faced a Batman wrought into a mirror of the Joker, a being of improbably stupid concept and even worse execution like the most twisted dreams of writers forever adored with the concept of a rich orphan who rewrote himself into a lesser rodent-instead-of-Fox branded imitation of Zorro and with the idea of a monster clown overpromoted for the lack of imagination and wit. Against the weighted forces of contrived writing and a character pushed too long and too hard, Perpetua strove in vain, and the Azar laughed as she vanished and left her thrashing in the nightmarish grasp of a thing that had been once and yet never was.

The Khan rose and groaned. The wound to his chest hurt like nothing except the transformation into the statues had ever done, but not enough that he couldn't call on a Mother Box and open a Boom Tube to take himself back to Apokolips. The light welcomed him with its embrace and he smiled, faintly.

EARTH, TEMPLE OF AZARATH:

Returned to her new temple, and seeing with satisfaction that its nature had become that of pure ivory and gold, and satisfied that now she could call upon the nature of the lesser spawn of Death unhindered, the monster cast her mind out into the wider recesses of her future conquest. Her eyes closed and her mind's presence weighed upon the Fifty-One worlds and their associated Hypertime-divergences, and then they flashed open. Surtr and his niece were on-world, and the murderer of Despair could be a problem. She'd sought to awaken the kind of power that could fundamentally destroy and rebuild one of the Seven Principles that bound reality, and to awaken her, but it only now dawned on her that the powers she was awakening were profound even for one of her kind, especially when most of her waged other wars and when the whole was seldom lucid for long enough to see a plan through.

She grit her teeth in frustration. To have failed once was bad enough but at least there it had been the tether's weakness more than her own. A fool she had been to trust the Gem could not be cracked by other minds when she showed this was so. To fail twice....

Then she felt the Unmaker's presence and her eyes flashed open. Well _that_ complicated things.

GOTHAM CITY:

Yeneli drank in the dismal aura of Gotham City with a smile, her breathing in its nature like that of a wine aficionado at a tasting.

This was a city of shadows and of misery, where depravity and barbarism walked in a guise that proclaimed itself lunacy but was in truth more the sign of the corruption and weakness in the hearts of the children of Midgard. She had endured the sword of Diana of Themyscira, and moved from Qurac to here. Her chest still pained her, though the pain was receding as the vitality of her kind and of her magics cleansed it. She had grasped in the wake of her changes that there had been a force that had stolen into the Dreaming and awakened her, and knew, at one level, that there was only one thing that such a force could be seeking, something that'd make the Heart of Death a worthwhile target to seek.

Long ago, when she had been driven to and past the realm of the Delirium of the Endless yet to come in the wake of her anger at being conned by the treacherous entity Desire, she had discovered a secret element of the Seven Elements of Death. It was a misnomer, really. Of the seven, there were six divided equally between symbols of life and death, the daughter of Death,, a legend locked within the Source Wall (maybe, it was clear that her own resurrection meant certain old ghosts had stirred). The son of Life, within his cocoon. The heart of the seven, a sigil of sigils, supposedly from well before the dawn of this universe, though she doubted that anything could thus endure.

She herself, the second of the three of death, for hers had been the blade that had slain the very concept and realm of Despair of the Endless, and come near to slaying Death, nearest of anything that had ever done so.

And then here, in this Gothic city that seemed like the more demented designs of a mortal filmmaker she'd seen tattered posters of on a building in Qurac, there was the path that could lead to the other, without which none could find it.

She did not know why a thing that was ancient when the Empire of Xoth had fallen and become the core around which the Star Sol and its planets would form had received the modern name of the Lazarus Pits, but here, in Gotham, was a link to not the one wielded by Ra's Al-Ghul, the demented and maddened eco-terrorist, but to the very first of their kind, a pool that had brought immortality. Among the various entities who had been affected by this one in the past was a ruthless Ugandan who had gained a kind of strange immortality of sorts. Ayesha, she who must be obeyed. That name was not known to Yeneli, nor would she have cared if she had. Hers was a weapon that had slain one of the Seven and come near to doing so twice. A mere Ugandan of unnnaturally pale skin, a result of the deformities produced by the Ur-Lazarus Pit and part of what had driven her to madness, that was less than nothing to her.

So here, in the shadowy hellscape of Gotham, she would seek the path to the first of the Pits, lest the waters be tapped by whatever force had awoken her.

She was in the form of a being dark as the molten magma of the Earth's blood and yet human in shape, with hair like flowing flames. Her eyes burned like coals and yet in a city where such entities as Clayface and Poison Ivy dwelt, this did not mark her as exceptionally distinct in the context of the Batman's city. A proof of this, though again she neither noticed nor cared came in the form of a being who dressed, in spite of calling himself after the name of a Greek God, in the manner of an Ancient Roman. He'd turned around an alley when he encountered her wearing what seemed to be black leggings and a black shirt, and then he puffed out his chest.

"Behold, Maxie Zeus! Incarnate majesty of the God of Thunder!"

The tall woman turned toward him and her metahuman eyes glowed like coals.

 _ **I've fought Gods**_ , she spoke in a voice of inhuman nature, feminine and yet resonant with timbres that did not match anything of the Earth. _**I know Gods. I have fought them before. I have fought Odin and Thor and I have ravaged the realm of Vanaheim. More to the point my blade slew Despair of the Endless and I have come closest of all that is or will ever be to slaying Hel herself, Queen of the Dead. I came this close-and for a moment Maxie heard the pride leavened with deep sorrow and regret as her fingers pressed together, a grinding sound that made his ears ache following-to slaying Hel, and in doing so, taking all life and death in this world and in the next with me.**_

_**I have seen the Olympians and driven off Pallas Athena when she sought to dissuade me from the death of Despair.** _

**_So I have seen Zeus, little Midgardian. You are no Zeus._ **

Then the being did something he thought wondrous. At her side was a blade with an ornate scabbard and she drew the blade and for a moment fire rippled up and down its edges and a second dawn rose in Gotham that briefly shattered its cloud-cover.

Maxie ran with third degree burns covering his arms and parts of his chest, and was soon back in Arkham receiving genuine treatment for a genuine mental illness again, after the outbreak of issues from the visit of Delirium of the Endless.

The creature smiled and snorted with contempt. The fires dimmed and the blade was back in its scabbard, and behind her she left melted streelights, cars that had melted enough to literally seem to merge with the ground and vice-versa, and buildings weakened enough that the wind shook them with low groans of protest.

With that she strode deeper into Gotham, her fire-light seeming to drink in its shadows and to merge with them.

LENORE CAFE, 48 HOURS LATER:

Death stirred her coffee, waiting for Raven. The talk with Despair had lifted a burden off of both of them. Her poor sister knew that she was loved and that there was nothing to forgive. She in turn knew that her sister did not resent the circumstances of her death, at least in any sense that blamed her, or even Desire for them. Raven had departed for the last two days to the Malebolge, the realm where Death was now the unexpected and not altogether willing queen, now, at Raven's side due to her binding. Between that and the blank spots where her body changed into that of her Earth-Three face and she only saw the aftermath, a power that Raven had given to Starfire likewise and which Starfire was far less hesitant to wield, the last couple of days were....inconsistent in her memory.

Raven had been gone for two days, three had passed since she'd spoken to her sister. Her hair still had the singular white streak but no migraines had followed, and her function was in a kind of stability again, even if the Breath of Life felt slightly better than the Hands of Death. That disturbed her much more than she was willing to let on to others, even of her family. She, like Oblivion, had taken lapses between the existence of their multiverses within the Overvoid to explore the vast realms of the Outside, and there she had encountered _them._ Entities called the Kelzhandari, by some, Urhalzantrani by themselves. Beings that were rising to the kind of power that fallen Xoth had once wielded, the first entities of this sort to come along in several vingtillion years.

 _They_ were just some of the realms she'd encountered, she'd gone into other worlds where her counterpart existed only as characters in the panels of a comic book, and there she'd lived a few lives in a few different Earths as a woman in a lovely mundane realm where the existence of the Beyond was a thing of fiction, of drugs, and of speculation often fueled by drugs.

She knew just how immense Existence truly was, and that the universes, superheroic and otherwise, where she was the concept of Life and Death and their ultimate arbiter without any who could gainsay her will bar Destiny, who next to never did so, were immensely outnumbered by others she'd glimpsed only small elements of. She had even gone to the fabled Halls outside time and space, the Timeless Halls where the creature known as the Crawling Chaos in his twin faces the Arkhalai and the Arkhanazun presided over the deepest corners of existence, and knew the horrid things that lurked there and their secret.

She had met an entity there, one of many beings that shared her name and her function, as she had in other universes. Ol' ALLCAPS as she called him, and his friend THE DEATH OF RATS was her favorite and her nearest and dearest friend. In another world, she'd even taken great pleasure in emulating OL' ALLCAPS' spirit and taking on the appearance of a seeming male, for she had no true gender, and relished the changes to just be someone different. In still another world she was the Lady on the Grey, and rode a wonderful horse, the other face of her steed she would ride in the End of this Multiverse as she had in all the others. The Pale Horse.

Her other favorite was one she called the Jamaican, due to his accent. He was most like her of all of them, even if he pretended to be dour and angry, and he had the strangest pair of children she'd ever seen as companions. The girl had tried to bully her into compliance as she had the Jamaican, once. "Mandy" had been terrified into being a shivering stammering woman and Grim, as the Jamaican called himself, had likewise been terrified (which amused her). She so seldom let her true face show and it had been a thing of some satisfaction to make the little girl know better. A petty thing, but still a real one.

A lesser favorite was ol' Stuffed Shirt, as she called him, when Stuffed Shirt had been a him. Then a Winchester-sized incident had happened and he was now a she that dressed in leather and had fangirled over her the first time they'd met in the years between her encounter with Raven and her return to this world.

Her least favorite was the one in the neighboring multiverse, the entity that wielded Thanos of Titan, a being she had more reason than most to hate, as a hired killer and then kept trying to extricate herself out of the mess when a stalker with a crush on both of them gained the power she gave him and proved that more power made him worse, not better. The one that aped either an appearance like her love in the Prime-Earth, or who had lately taken to wearing a face very like her own. Few beings other than Desire truly saw her more hostile side these days, but that one never failed to find a way to do it.

When, as she sipped her tea and relaxed in the cafe, the worries about and for Raven laden with the shadow of Dream's fate when he'd gone to Hell pervading over her in a way that left her fidgeting whenever the tea was on the table (hence why she'd held it in her hands so much more) there was a sudden burst of cold air redolent with the aura of the ashes that blew from dead civilizations, the unfathomable aura of decay and of the process of the transformation of bodies to corpses and corpses to ash, she pinched her nose and sighed, heavily, placing the tea down as her fists clenched.

Beside her, at one of the three chairs at her table sat a being who looked very like the Raven of the Prime Earth had prior to a few of those Crises that seemed awfully convenient retroactive shifts in the nature and the person of the heroes, and who resembled in a way her own love if she wore her Azarathi cloak concealing her body (which she seldom did these days). Only the gleaming light in her eyes and the marks on her cheeks gave away that she was not that Raven.

She pinched her nose again as the other Death turned to her and spoke in her voice that was, in this case, as sweet as her own though it carried every bit the aura of she who gleefully unleashed Thanos: 

_Hello, Tel._

Death turned to look at her multiversal equivalent in name, though Oblivion was more truthfully hers in function, and with that same heavy sigh and a very audible gritting of her teeth said:

**_Oh, it's you. What do you want?_ **

Mistress Death steepled her hands and leaned forward to speak.

NEW GENESIS:

Uxas looked to his counterpart.

**_Now?_ **

Izaya nodded.

_Now. He is weakened. Something has struck him a blow enough to wound him to a point that he is no longer more powerful than both of us._

With that they turned to their squabbling forces where the Justice League of the Earth that had spawned the World Tree had tried in vein with commendable effort to stabilize the situation and the power of the New Gods' rival brawling civilizations. With a single word from Izaya the dissension stilled, and in the timeless element of the realms of the New Gods the Justice League of that world would return to find the Justice Lords present on their world, even as in other cases their clash had already occurred, and brought with it turmoil in different elements of the eddies and flows of time in its winding course.


	9. Wheels Within Wheels:

LENORE CAFE:

Death of the Endless turned to face her counterpart in the other multiverse. She pinched her nose, biting back the deep sigh that sought to bubble up out of her, and spoke much more calmly toward the woman who was dressed in a robe very like Raven's Azarathi robe, save that it was a deep purple hue. Raven had mentioned that the Death of the other multiverse resembled her, and Death had not really listened nor cared, but as she looked at her now, she could not deny the resemblance. 

Death's gaze was amused, but it was not the kind of amusement she had, or was capable of. There was always a thread of malice and menace about this Death that made it hard for them to get along. She could get along fine with her Discworld counterpart, and with the Jamaican, and even the two brats that hung around him. This one?

_Well, to start with, I just want to savor for a moment, even if I have other things, much more important things, that matter....that you now have your own world-destroying entity that you're helplessly besotted with. She's even made of you a slave to warm her bed at nights. Thanos started that way with me when he went off on the career I talked him into. I still have the outfit he made me wear, then._

She smiled, her unkind smile that could be welcoming, if insincerely so, or the grin that heralded the latest rampages by Thanos under her orders.

_And now look at you, the daughter of the demon Trigon, a monster that wiped out her whole world. Where is the little squeeze anyway?_

_**She's in her realm, finishing up a tour.** _

_A realm, now? So not merely a genocidal abomination in human form, but one that is ruler of her own entire dimension?_ She tutted her teeth in a mocking sense.

She steepled her hands and leaned forward.

 _First the creature of the World-Destroyers, now another one that destroyed a world. I heard way back in the day that your brother Dream loved you a little too much. You never returned that, I'm sure. Always too prudish. But.... she smirked, her smile becoming much nastier. Maybe it was because you loved another brother? Maybe it's Desruction you wanted to fu-_ Death of the Endless's hand lashed out with a hard slap that caused her to jerk back a bit. Her arrival had placed the cafe into a brief zone where time stood still, a product of the meeting of twp personifications of Death that had its little conveniences. Not having mortals witness both the slap and her reaction to it and her fear of the Endless was one of them.

 _ **Do not say such things,**_ the Endless hissed, her fists clenched tightly.

Mistress Death inclined her head, acknowledging the point, but the amused glint in her eyes intensified. _Temper, temper little Endless._

 _ **Why are you here?**_ Death's teeth were gritted and her fists still more tightly clinched, enough her knuckles hurt.

 _To give you a warning. The subject you've probably already figured out_ , she said, as her eyes widened at the white streak in Death of the Endless's hair. Reaching out to grab it she grabbed it with enough strength Death of the Endless audibly yelped, as her eyes focused straight on it.

_The Source Wall, the barrier that keeps our multiverses safe, has shattered. Things have crept in from beyond the Wall._

_**I already knew that much. The Undying Flame is here, and she wants me......well, maybe not dead-as she shoved Mistress Death back in her seat, eyes watering slightly from the pain of the grip on her hair-but at least no longer doing the half of my function that is death and dying. I know enough of the Urhalzantrani to know there is only one reason that they would come here to antagonize things. So that warning of yours is unnecessary.** _

_Oh it's not her that's the warning, dearie. It's the Unmaker. She's here._

Death of the Endless froze. _ **T-The Unmaker?**_ The brief stammer in her voice was that of a much greater show of emotion from other entities.

 _Yes,_ Mistress Death nodded. _Her. The Blood-Harvester herself._

Death of the Endless suddenly looked at her gloves, her mouth forming words she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to speak aloud.

Then she looked at Mistress Death, whose impish and even vaguely horrid style of amusement had faded in return for shock mixed with unease.

_Her arrival and the efforts of Azar, the Undying Flame herself to change you......_

Mistress Death's expression evolved from unease to very visible worry, and her hand gripped Death's forearm with a strong grip, one that made the Endless wince, and then she spoke in a voice that gave the Endless an eye as to how much her counterpart could be compelling when she wanted to be. 

_You. cannot. change. You are the eldest of us, the embodiments of Death. You are more ancient than most of us truly know. I am one of the few who's found that out, at least before your family did. If she doesn't know, you must tell her. If she does, you should be grateful. The Undying Flame is no foe to dismiss lightly. The Unmaker......_

Her voice became more intense and sounded far less human, speaking in the resonances known to those entities of their kind, and to them alone.

_Much more than the stake of your half of our multiverse is at stake. They sent me because you and I share the title, Oblivion wanted to go, for you and he share the same function. I may not be the best person to send this message, but if you shoot the messenger-_

**_You just get less mail_** , Death of the Endless replied, a soft quirk of familiarity on her lips, as Mistress Death nodded.

She disappeared into a flash of darkness and Death of the Endless turned to see Raven staring at her wild-eyed, with wonder, and stared blankly and uncomprehendingly, at first.

THE MALEBOLGE:

Raven went to her realm a couple of days ago in Earth terms, somewhat longer in its. It was a vast and sprawling plane within the environs of the Diarchy of Remiel and Duma, and one of the most strategically located planes, around the throne of Hell, and thus of vital importance in its politics. She had learned much of what had shaped her father, and made him what he was, and as he was. This was a stark and a spartan land, a realm beyond realms, full of lava and mountains (and the memory of the Earth as it had been for those three days endured. And strengthened) and of the flame-creatures that had been a significant portion of his army. They were far from the only beasts in this realm, and the only demons. The damned here suffered as they did elsewhere, and she had neither time nor inclination nor patience to handle such banal things.

She had walked around, exploring the realm, and finally had given her brother Ruskoff the task to be her iron fist when she was not present, a task he had accepted gracefully and with a surprising amount of loyalty. She locked firmly within herself the suspicion, and indeed the contempt that her brother was a better servant than a master (a thought worthy of her father and thus the more for suppression). She learned of the Scrying Pool, a substance akin to blood but not in truth blood, and had gone there. Here was how her father, their father, had exercised his knowledge and his power over the circle and within the mortal planes. It could travel up and down the streams of time, and of place. Could and did.

Curiosity had led her to ask to see the fullness of the circumstances surrounding the death of Despair of the Endless, and what she had seen horrified her.

Then she had asked to see Death's own future, noticing that scrying the future was difficult, it had become so when the Undying Flame had re-ignited the temple fires of Azarath and built not one but two enclaves, at least, perhaps more. She caught a bemusing sequence of events, a feather, a circle, the feather burning, arguments among the Endless, and deep passions with Death in her bed that were present even in her own vision and her empathy from the vision as marked with emotions that complicated the physical elements, insofar as that was a truthful word.

She did not have a context for what she saw when she looked into a pool that granted a fuller kind of omniscience on a smaller scale. Remiel and Duma had mentioned this to her and other lords of Hell who had asked of the changes. The Undying Flame had complicated scrying, the presence of the Unmaker meant that short-term futures could be seen in perfect clarity. The medium was that sequence of swift images without a context to truly parse them. The long-term future......was blank. She had been told this, but to see it, to truly see it, rocked her. She knew the name Unmaker, she knew the term Undying Flame.

She did not quite remember from where, or how she knew them, and that was a task for her for when she returned.

When she'd looked as far as the future allowed, focusing on her love, what she saw awed her and she felt a sudden set of emotions she had no context for, and her mind reeled with the possibilities and probabilities that were shown. Not long after she'd teleported to Earth, where the traces of a localized time-bubble faded and she'd seen her lover, who looked at her with confusion, and then reached to take her arm and teleported her to Titans Tower.

GOTHAM CITY, THE NIGHT BEFORE:

The search for the junction between the worlds had proven an interesting one. Gotham was a horrid place by night, full of monsters.

Not the kind of monsters that strode into Metropolis, usually, but monsters all the same.

Yeneli, by contrast, was the kind of monster that would have and did stride into Metropolis, or into the lives of Zatanna Zatara and John Constantine. She had sought to do this quietly, as a human. The various lowly criminals, the products of the desperate smog-and-poverty ridden contexts of the slums of this nightmarish city, were deterred by her eyes flashing into burning coals, and smaller elements of her powers. They were desperate, they were not the kind of people who'd see what seemed to be a metahuman (even if she was nothing so familiar as that) and seek to contest it.

Then there were the damned fools in clown masks, many wearing purple or purple-styled suits. These were not deterred, and even the displays of fire did not do it, so she sighed and then was no longer human nor close to it. She became the force of living magma clad in golden armor (her human clothes merely the armor transformed for comfort) wielding her sword. The dark and smog-ridden nights of Gotham were lit with fires. Some suspected it was Firefly on the loose, but it did not match. Firefly was not a giant, a force of horror wielding a blazing sword and emitting enough heat to literally melt cars and streets. The eerie bow-shock of flame scattered the Joker's henchmen, which infuriated the Clown Prince of Crime enough that he decided to step in personally with his pet Kalashkinov, which he'd named Harleen after his moll.

He had expected them to have run merely from a meta, which would have been embarrassing enough.

What he saw was a living force of primordial fire, if fire was the right word. An elemental being of a kind that seemed older than gods, though younger than the Endless.

He was the Goddamn Joker, he gave other supervillains nightmares and even the last son of Krypton feared him, yet this thing snarled and looked at him with a growl of contempt that seemed tectonic.

He strode forward with his eyes narrowed and a low tone of menace to his voice only to see the entity move the great sword toward him. He smelled the charring of flesh and saw his tie burning and where he wished the Batman to break his one rule and to kill him and would set up elaborate gambles to that effect, this was not a death he was willing to die. In fear the Joker fled, his flesh scorched, parts of his suit burned off, and there was much speculation that followed as to the nature of the kind of monster that could make one of the most fearsome supervillains and sadists in Gotham and among humanity (only Zsasz worse in Gotham terms for sadism) flee and give him such strange and terrible burns on his flesh.

It became known as the Night of the Burning, and in the wake of that clash none of the human and slightly superhuman to outright superhuman forces of crime and evil in Gotham dared challenge it. Parts of Gotham's slums burned and so did parts of its richer elements, and it was thus easy for the Batman and for Batwing to track the bow-shock of the Burning. The progress of melted street signs, of corpses burned black with agonized screams frozen on their faces, the molten footsteps marked by armored boots that left cracked and melted ground in their way, all made brutally clear the threat and that it was at best metahuman. At worst....

Batwing asked Batman quietly: "You don't think this is the thing Diana didn't quite kill, do you?"

Batman blinked, and said nothing. Understanding the answer, Batwing laughed, mirthlessly.

They encountered it at the edge of insular Gotham, near the edge of New Jersey and Delaware, the golden creature with magma-skin giving off such heat that their bodies felt like they were boiling alive in their own sweat. It was partially humanoid, it stood on two legs longer than its arms, and its face was roughly akin to a human pattern but it was no human, and no monster of the kind Diana faced. It reminded Batman most of the giant of fire the Justice Society had fought in the old days, but even then it didn't quite match up, seemingly older, and more fearsome.

The entity looked at them with two eyes that burned like coals, reminding them somewhat of Clark's. Clark's eyes burned when he was angered, these were eyes of literal flames that left them both cautious, unwilling to engage an unknown meta, especially one wielding a broadsword that could have done justice as Cloud Strife's weapon in the Final Fantasy games. The thing looked at them curiously, then smirked and raised the great sword and then in a single shattering motion brought the edge straight down at the outskirts of Gotham's equivalent of a beach, and in a blinding flash of light the entity vanished into the ignition of a second Sun in Gotham's smog-ridden night, a brief glimpse of stars that lasted for two further nights marking the passing of the smog over the city.

THE DREAMING:

Dream of the Endless was unprepared the first time one of those from _Outside_ came to his realm. It had jolted him, and the strangeness of finding his own realm responding to the will and presence of another as it did to himself had faded swiftly. This time when the presence made itself known with a weight that seemed to form something akin to a gravitational field around a star, he arrived immediately, wearing his helm.

_**Greetings, Dream of the Endless.** _

The thing that spoke to him seemed human enough, a Black woman who had a cloud of natural hair above her head, her eyes burning like suns in her head. Nine of them, this time, not two, as she made that small concession to her true form. And beneath each eye markings akin to Kohl. Eyes of Horus. That did not slow him down, it made him angrier and his library manifested his displeasure by seeming to produce constructs that wrapped around the being's hands and feet as she simply stared at him calmly.

**_I take it from this reaction that you've seen my sister, then._ **

Her smile was one of amusement, serrated fangs prominent with a face that was less human than it had been when he had first seen it.

She spoke with that same calmness and amusement, as if she were not in a realm where a single force was omnipotent and nothing could happen without his permission, and within the grasp of said being when he had started furious and become still mores.

_**I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you, Daniel Hall.** _

He froze. **How do you know that name?**

**_I know more than you suspect. I've met your sister several thousand times, whenever your corner of Existence temporarily ebbs from being. She comes to either my Fortress or to the Halls beyond time and space, where that which is known by two faces and ten thousand forms presides. She endures, Dream, more than the rest of you._ **

**_I neglected my sister's arrival in your part of existence because I wrote it off, that time. i suspected she would simply devour it and other portions of your multiverse would endure unharmed. Much like the recent nonsense with the Batman that dresses like the clown, or the man who fell into the nuclear reactor and walked out a God. I was wrong. A relief to be able to be wrong, in point of fact. Even the greatest power has its limits, and it is worth the reminder.  
_ **

With that her eyes flashed more brightly and for a moment she was not human at all but a giant clad in armor of silver with a cape of neon blue, and the weight of her presence was sufficient to snap the bonds that sought to hold her, the library of Dream returning to its equilibrium. Then she seemed to be human again, save the suns that burned where eyes ordinarily would have been, and save the sharp points on her ears.

**_She has been here, in the Dreaming, and I sought to ensure that any of the elements of her.....viral nature...that were here were eradicated. There were traces of it in the Source Wall, though they're not a problem....now._ **

Her smile was suddenly very much akin to that of the sister mentioned and at that point Dream could see the resemblance, and it made him begin to prepare to try to move out the unwanted visitor.

_**I am not here to harm you, or your family. Dear Mors is a good friend of mine, and I am worried about her.** _

**I know you, Unmaker. You did not earn that name, nor that of the Blood-Harvester, by a record of kindness to the realms in your gaze.**

She shrugged.

_**I am another element of the same concept that in this world is your sister's and none other. Here I am her guest and her lesser, for a delightful element. She is her concept given the element of kindness, compassion, empathy, all writ large. I am the inexorable and the inevitable, the concept as the implacable thing that nothing can stop nor slow down, that which will overcome all things in the end. So no, there is no kindness in me. She, and her good friend ALLCAPS of the Discworld have more than made it their own.** _

_**I am not here as foe, nor to fight battles for your kind or your world. Merely to do a favor for an old friend and to give my deranged sister's antics a halt. A permanent one, mind you. Your Wall is shattered, but she, at least, will cross it no further and perhaps in that process it will even be restored.** _

The being raised her hand, pointing to the same library the other of her kind had......'visited.'

**_There is a book missing here. She took it, did she not?_ **

Dream nodded.

_**Has the soul of one of those concepts best left to slumber unknown in its existence save only to you, Lord of Stories?** _

He nodded again.

**_I suppose that's fitting, she wouldn't care about the rest of this library even if I do. Every book never written, many of them bad, many of them surprisingly good, and the only thing she goes for is the soul of of a dead person._ **

She huffed.

_**This explains things. My thanks, Lord Shaper.** _

With that she vanished in a mirage-like fashion as Dream tapped his chin musingly. He went to his gallery and picked up the sigil of a book, and began to speak the ritual words that linked the realms of the Endless. In glowing light, Destiny welcomed him.

THE FIRST LAZARUS PIT, MOUNT SABINYO, UGANDA:

When she arrived at the first Lazarus Pit, she paused. For a location so essential to part of this great plan it was unpleasant, with a foul smell. The waters seemed stagnant and green and pulsed with an unhallowed light, and then she looked into the waters, seeing her reflection. Her eyes narrowed. A lock of her hair had been shorn off without her knowledge and that made her angry. She cast out with her magic and felt a circle in a place of ivory and gold, the unhallowed thing the Goddess had made of the Temple Azarath, and there the lock of her hair. In its arrogance, the force that had seize it had not set safeguards on her purloined objects. 

Her fist clenched and the lock of her hair manifested over the Lazarus pit and over her blade, which burned with a heat sufficient to render it ashes.

She smiled, coldly. ** _Only a fool would resurrect the power that killed an Endless and act like she'd become some puppet dancing on invisible strings._**

For a time she knelt by the pool and meditated, creating a set of wards that would alert her to the presence of someone, or somet _hing_ else.

Her wards pulsed with a power that broke her trance hours later, in the small hours of the morning the next day, as she opened her eyes.

Nothing. Evidently her captor was afraid to try strength with her if she was awake and fully so.

With an amused grin, she vanished in a sphere of fire. Time, now, to go to that city in California, and to see her lover, and perhaps to carve out the demoness's heart.

THE GARDEN OF THE FORKING PATHS:

**I have seen her, brother.**

Destiny's eyeless gaze was keen and discerning, and Dream fidgeted slightly. Only their sister could move comfortably between the realms of her family, even when he was here their exiled brother did not. Here, in the Garden, he was in the presence of a being as powerful as the Morningstar, mightier than Death, and certainly moreso than he was. He did not often think of brother Destiny this way, but now, with the way his brother looked at him, with the changes in the statues in his garden, he remembered it.

_You've seen the Unmaker?_

He nodded.

_What did she tell you?_

**Don't you already know?**

_Yes, but it is written in my book that you would both ask that question and then answer mine._

**Very well,** Dream sighed. **She told me that she has come here to see our sister, her old friend. It seems when our sister leaves the universe she goes to very strange realms indeed. One of them is the Unmaker's Fortress of Eternity. A realm to which she evidently is one of the few to have been there and returned from intact and unchanged. She mentioned a virus, and damage to the Source Wall.**

Destiny nodded.

_That matches what I have seen. My brother, I am one who sees many things, if not most, but there are things that are beyond my sight. What our sister does when the universe ends, how Delight became Delirium, the boat from your realm that appeared in my garden....and these scions of Urhalzan. They are not of this world, it is when they go into areas governed by our spheres that I can see them most directly. I believe this is how the monster with the World-Tree came so near to undoing all that was until our sister intervened. Now, she is retailiating for that by attempting to change our sister._

Dream's posture, already stiff from shock became a new stiffness leavened by genuine fear. 

_My thoughts exactly, brother. Our sister has endured for far longer than any of us imagined, and now something has crawled from beyond the Source Wall intending to end that, though the rest of our realms would endure._

Destiny's face then changed from its usual stoic or angered expressions to one of a smile that made Dream uneasy. It was like rocks walking in the evening, a thing that should not be, especially not with that kind of emotion flavoring it.

_The thing that seeks all this has done a rare thing, brother._

With that Destiny closed his book.

_It wants our sister altered, and in this moment, subject to the whim of a creature that is not in my book, I am free to act and not merely to watch. I have already begun to do so, and taken action to reward our sister's lover with her realm that is hers by rights, and I shall be doing other things as well. I apologize in advance, incidentally, for the argument in my garden. There are consequences to being required to watch and obey the dictates of the Book, and to the reality of what is so when I am freed of that task._

Destiny's smile became still more unpleasant to see.

_I am free to act, brother, to do as you do, even to do to a degree what our brother the Prodigal has done. It is a wondrous thing, and that freedom is becoming ever more real. It's fascinating, really. This is how you all live, and you take it for granted. But now....._

Destiny moved his fingers slightly and Dream found himself in the Dreaming. Four of the objects recovered by the monster from beyond the Wall were already there. Only the sixth would stump her for a time, as it was simultaneously simple and yet the creature will find in it an intractable puzzle until something makes it change.

Here, when he was free to act and to wield his power to command his function and to reassert its role, he felt for a moment the temptation to not do so, to let things and himself be free as his sister had done. The inspiration struck him and he went to the pool in his Garden, a pool he'd never really had need to use, to see what would happen if he did. Destiny watched, fascinated and appalled, and his course was set. The further irony that he would gain his freedom only to end it would be something to tickle his sister's humor. He would welcome that, in the end, even if it seemed a concept fraught with the kind of paradox that belonged in the realm of his youngest sister.

DEATH VALLEY:

Surtr, King of Muspelheim, had spent the day meditating in this place, spending time here as in the other deserts in the warmer parts of Midgard. Here he was closest to home outside active volcanoes, and here he could ponder the strange magic he'd felt across the world. Los Angeles, Gotham, Qurac. A magic that could not exist, could not possibly exist, that had died with the blade that had hewn down Despair and come near to destroying Death (and indeed, she had only survived, so he'd learned from an enrage Dream of the Endless by the aid of her brother Destruction).

His niece had died, become the second Despair, and her loss was to Muspelheim what the loss to Vanaheim of Freyr's sword was to it, and the arrival of Baldr to Hel's Sunless Lands to Asgard. One did not come back from murdering one of the Endless and becoming their replacement, and from the events of that change playing its part in the sundering of the two kindest of the Endless from each other. It was a transformation coded into the material fabric of Existence. He mourned her loss, even if he found it hard to stomach the presence of the Endless given the emotions.

He knew that magic, knew it quite well. It kept flaring into being, and the power of her sword, a thing that had vanished with her and been little less powerful than his own blazed likewise, multiple times. Each flare a small star, each flare a thing that left him undecided.

From the sky swooped Diana of Themyscira, the monster-slayer without equal. The being who'd sent his species, where those who left their worlds went out and struck out to make names for themselves, back to his realm. He did try to warn them, in all honesty, but they insisted on not listening, on dismissing the girl in the bathing suit as nothing but a soft product of the Olympians' decadence and thus an easy target. And every single time without fail they'd returned to this realm. Then the news had struck down the wavelengths of magic of a monster of fire in Los Angeles the Godkiller had not slain, and that had been when his misgivings had begun to change.

His niece had slain one Endless and nearly destroyed another. She had been vulnerable to slaying in turn, to her transformation, but nothing, not even he, who faced the Godkiller blade save the Endless, who were not gods and were in these senses profoundly above them, should have endured. It was his suspicion, amplified by both the powerful elements of her magic in Los Angeles, and the report of the clash that it had been she Diana had faced. The look on her face, the slight trepidation, and the awareness of who he was, and what he was, that took the confirmation beyond any possible doubt.

His eyes turned to Diana.

_**Greetings, woman of wonder. Are you here to shank me with your pretty blade?** _

Diana shook her head.

"No, King Surtr. I am here to ask for your help."

He raised an eyebrow.

"The Aesir are in Norway, intending to strike Titans Tower and the Endless who's there, and they've moved that timetable up. Not Yule, they will be moving in two nights and a day. I suspect it has to do with the monster that crawled in from beyond the Wall."

_**How can I help?** _

"We had for a time the help of Apokolips and New Genesis in withstanding anything that could be brought against us by them. I do not know if Highfather and Darkseid will return, but if they don't, your help would be welcome."

_**Mine? Your team regularly banishes beings from beyond the stars all the time.** _

Diana nodded. "True, but in this case things are different. It's as if the fundamental structure of the universe is flux."

_**Very perceptive of you, daughter of Hippolyta. It seems like this because it is. You fear, perhaps, that the structures that shielded you due to the Lord Shaper are breaking down?** _

"The...Lord Shaper? What does Dream of the Endless have to do with this?"

_**Everything, my dear. Your kind of heroes are the inheritors of the old days, when my kind were the true-banes of an age of earlier heroes and earlier powers, the glory days of Teth-Adam as champion of the Wizard. You are lore yourselves now, encrusted with elements of power that draws him to you, and your deeds are preserved in special places within the most secret corners of his library, where instead of the books that are never written, the new lore of new gods and new heroes is built and writ large. Your kind of heroism follows patterns dictated. Now there are foes that have come twice, from realms outside, and obedient to other laws.** _

His smile was not kind.

_**I will help you against the Aesir, it is always my pleasure to do so. Against me, and against my kind, they know fear. But you look to the wrong things here, to contest things. She has risen out of the darkness of the realms beyond the realm that links our spheres. And myself with my parallel in that other set of universes, who is far more active than I in being a bane of Asgard and of its heroes.** _

Surtr shrugged. _**I don't much care for Surtur, he's a bit of a prick. But the lesson there is worth considering, for that is a being like myself and he is different. The foe that sought the Yggdrassil motif is not truly of your world. I suspect that is the name Azar, which in her case is that of the Fire of the Parsees, that draws her here. She can wield it as a totem, but for all that she wields it, and sets herself into this rhythm of heroes and monsters, she obeys her own laws and there is her greatest strength. She is not of your universe, nor of this multiverse.**_

_**The power that works here, on those native to it, will work inconsistently on those who are not.** _

His smile remained frozen and then met his eyes further. _ **Are there none of you who have such traits?**_

Diana cocked her head curiously and then her eyes widened, and she sheathed the God-Killer.

 _ **All right, then**_. Surtr stood up.

_**Time to speak to the new age of heroes and the new mythology.** _

In a motion of his hands they vanished in a sphere of fire.

TITANS TOWER:

Death and Raven returned, and Raven sat as Death cuddled with her for a moment. She was amused how much Death of the Endless was a cuddle-bug when she had the permission and the luxury to be, and never tired of the deceptively light sensation of Death pressed up against her. The Titans had not been too busy in her absence, but even where they were, they had Conner and Wally to more than compensate for a couple of days in the Malebolge.

She'd heard in a surprising amount of detail and interwoven and interrupted sentences from Gar and Conner about a clash with, of all people for them to clash with, no less than their old pal Mammoth, who with his sister Shimmer had proven quite an effective supervillain in his own right. He was genetically enhanced to a point that only a half-Kryptonian coming into the fullness of his Kryptonian heritage proved powerful enough to outweigh that combination of strength and increased intelligence, though that was due largely to the reality that Kryptonians were just that strong.

That was the most notable event, and it wasn't that much of a much. What was more amusing was seeing Dick staring at Starfire with his lovey-dovey eyes while Vic and Sarah talked about when Vic could go to Sarah's workplace. Sarah Simms worked in disability counseling and there, at least, Victor Stone was much more capable than most of giving not merely the kind of celebrity appearances superheroes were good at when they needed to be, but someone who'd been there, who knew realities like this, and understood it. Raven's smiles were soft and affectionate, and she sent her own soothing empathy in and with Death. What she'd seen, she'd need to discuss but not right now. Not when she was back from the Malebolge, her head still reeling at her new role. Not, too, when that white streak and the elements of her command feather still told and made those elements known. She had bound Death, and that conversation she'd had reminded her of what this meant, and how much and how much danger there was inherent to all of that, and to all of those aspects. Her pool had not shown her anything that could help her with the quest to free her, only a circle and the command feather burning and what laid beyond that. 

After a quiet meal by her standards, Raven and Death walked hand in hand to her room.

RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

Raven enjoyed that here, she was free to be fully herself with a partner who had proven more able than most not only able to take this, but willing. For so long she'd resented that her heritage, her powers, damned her to be more destructive than she'd wished. She could have done this with her teammates or baseline humans, sure. If she'd wanted to kill them, and not just the body but to do incalculable harm to the soul. Even someone like Starfire or Donna, among the most powerful and tough women not just of their generations of superheroines, but of the entire group of heroes on Earth, could not have taken that fullness without running that risk far moreso than she would have ever wanted.

Death of the Endless could be stripped with a motion of her hands, bound with the shadows of eyes and mouths, the shadows interlocking around her arms and legs and caressing her breasts and along her labia, working her to eagerness, her pale face shining. She could force her to kneel and lower her head, grasp her with a grip that would have torn titanium and which even Kryptonian flesh beneath a blue sun would have felt. She could feel that tongue at work, and those lips, kissing along her inner thighs and nibbling, the gentleness in a strength that could, even in her weakness and recovery far surpass her own if she wished. Death was never truly in danger from her even at her strongest, and that knowledge but emboldened her, hisses and gasps and soft phrases of encouragement on her part blending in with the thrusts into Death, the Endless groaning at that deep level that seemed interwoven within the very elements of reality itself.

She smirked, contented, and relished the moment. The worries of her visions would fade, now was just the heady rush, and it was always a heady rush, of one of the seven principles of life, one of the most powerful entities in existence, having her do this. Realizing that she was eager to be subservient in these ways, to let herself feel this, and to relish the empathic loops that made things more intense and which made being with her terrifying for mortals. The empathic loops, on a mortal frame of a baseline human could be lethal. Superhuman bodies, even the more powerful ones, could cope better, but not fully so.

She'd wondered how a New God or Goddess could potentially have matched but it didn't really mean or make that much difference, really. Death's orgasm amplified the way her lips and tongue pushed into her, her nose rubbing against Raven's clit as Raven came simultaneously and twice, Death eagerly and easily swallowing everything Raven's body let loose, before she pulled back, and then let the tendrils loose while reclining on her bed to watch and listen, the Endless enjoying herself so much so that she relaxed, curled against Raven, and fell into that kind of restful state that was letting parts of her heal and recharge in ways she had not known she had truly needed.

Raven's arms slid around her, worries receding into the haze of pleasure, though still there, in the deeper corners of her subconscious.

Tomorrow she would let Death be on top, she decided. Assuming the supervillains and the various cosmic horrors that seemed to be clustering to Earth and to the multiverse more often than in the past gave them the chance, that is.

THE TEMPLE AZARATH:

The Azar returned to her temple, assured that all was going well until she returned to her circle, brought to the Temple by a strange spike of uncertainty, one that she could not place....until she returned to her circle and saw that the lock of hair from the heart of Death had vanished, as if it had never been. Frozen in bemusement, the Azar snarled, a sound that echoed as the wind within the Temple and in the citadel that had been the Church of Blood with the exact same timbre. So her little pawn sought to try to defy her, did she? Very well, then. She would have to secure another lock, in a much more pleasant way.

Over this moment of sudden bemusement hung the further cloud of the sixth of the objects, and the one hardest to retrieve. An element of Death's soul, but, she mused, a concept could not have a soul. It was an abstraction. Death was a thing, a concept, an abstraction to be rendered irrelevant and null and void. One could not grasp what was not present, nor a symbol thereof. The rest she could gather any time she pleased, Death's blood, the waters of Resurrection. And the lock, preferably by her own blade and if it took the skull of she who was the slayer of Despair with her, well she'd not shed a tear.

But the soul.....

She strode from the circle to her gilded throne and steepled her hands when she sat there. This was a puzzle, one she would need the fuller weight of her focus to resolve. She could not count forever on the prospect that her control would last, and if it slipped, if she lost her focus and went back to the mindless hunger....

She would lose again, she knew it full well. Even absent the Unmaker, she had come too far. She could not risk this, she would not. And unfortunately this time the Unmaker was here.

Her steepled hands moved to her face and she rubbed her forehead, growling in anger and frustration.

Beside her stood a being with rainbow-hued hair and heterochromic eyes, clad in a mini-skirt and topless in a mesh top, appearing like a woman in her early twenties for no particular reason at all. Delirium of the Endless smiled.

She was not as good at patterns as her wonderful older brother who'd looked after her and helped her be stable for a time. But here, she did not need to be. She'd been looked after by her older siblings enough without ever being able to fully focus to help them in turn, until now. Now, when a being of enormous power was sliding into her realm. She could help her sister, she grinned, and none but her would ever be the wiser.

She strode from the shadows toward the creature that growled on the Gilded Throne and rocked itself, eyes twitching, and raised her sigil.

It feared her realm, did it? So then would it be.

JUMP CITY WATERFRONT:

Yeneli smiled as she saw the tower shaped like the T. There, her love waited.

Her hand on the hilt of her sword, she took a few breaths to still herself, to provide calmness. There were no alternatives to this, the confrontation had to happen sooner than later. As she prepared to move, she felt a hand on her pauldron and turned. Destiny of the Endless stood right beside her, and she froze, eyes bugging out in shock, and to her own consternation and frustration with herself, fear.

_I would have words with you._

She threw off his hand from her pauldron with a dismissive growl.

_**I don't care. I've business with that sister of yours.** _

When she sought to take a step and found her body immobile in the grasp of a power greater than her own, all she could do was turn her head. 

_I did not say that it was a choice._


	10. Timeless Halls and Mad Gods:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death of the Endless has a memory-flash of the time between universes, and the court of the Daemon-Sultan. 
> 
> Delirium succeeds in reawakening the madness of a cosmic virus in its fullest form. 
> 
> The Queen of Fables has a very bad day.

RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

Her function had resurrected enough that birth and death were resuming in an ever-wider portion of the multiverse, even with the binding casting its fetters and its restraints (the Titans would find across fifty-one worlds that they were shielded in a fashion that could not name) and with that recovery elements of her weakness that had been so since that day she'd sought to regain her feather and come nearest to her own destruction since a terrible blade of fire had impaled her heart. That was all she remembered, her love turned to madness, roaring in anger, lost to her sister's realm.

The blade's heat that had slain Despair and fulfilled its motif turned on her, accepting it. Wishing, then, that her long life would find proof of its endurance, and making no efforts to save herself. Heat unimaginable and a pain that even she could not fully comprehend and awakening who knew how much later not in Despair's realm but in Dream's, in pain and to the worried eyes of all her family, including the new Despair. That had been the closest she had come, and had ever come, to seeing if she truly was Endless or not. Then she'd had that incdent where the feather that turned her own nature against her had done its work and felt that, too. Felt an existential nightmare that had her caught in a shadowy realm where the Dreaming and the Mirrors of Despair intersected, for a time.

Since then she did not quite sleep or dream, for it was not to her to do this when reality endured, as long as her function was above a certain kind of level. She did not need it, merely time in her apartment to recharge and to know that closeness and tie to her own realm without actively being within it. She was still weak enough to require what wasn't quite sleep but was close enough, and it was in this sense, in the arms of her love, that she remembered one of the encounters she had in the wake of universes existing. 

TIMELESS HALLS:

She walked in a place that seemed on the outer elements like a great hall, the kind where a medieval pagan lord might have held court, with wine and song. This was but an outward shape that a more humanoid set of senses would have seen and here she was nothing human, she was herself, the towering being of many-angled nature and gleaming light and shadowy darkness intersecting. It was a long and lonely wait until the next universe, until the bittersweet sorrows of seeing her family again, and her tapestry was done. And now here she was.

There was a constant whining sound echoing in the background, a low and thrumming droning that made teeth ache and settled into bones to induce a kind of soreness in those not native to this realm. It was matched by low and staccato thunder, now one peal, now two, now six. She did not need to know things as intimately as her brother, Destiny, to know what it was that she heard. She'd seen them, the flautists and the drummers. She'd even seen a glimpse of that which they sought to keep in the depths of sleep. Part of her ached at the recognition and the horrid familiarity, the conceit.

To recognize that all reality ultimately at one remove was like her brother's realm meant that in a sense there was that closeness. At another....

She felt the two before she saw them, her eyes turning.

He was in a humanoid form (and to her own consternation she became her bone-hued self clad in dark clothes, her hair grown long in the wait between universes, past her shoulder blades, wings fully visible without fear of taking anything with them). Humanoid in that it had longer legs than arms, a vaguely simian face, and vaguely human proportions. Yet it was tall, much taller than any true human would have been. Its skin was dark, a black hue that was beyond anything of science to duplicate, his eyes flashing with distorted star-flames.

She was also in a humanoid shape, hair red as fire, eyes green as the savannah. Her skin was a pale pink, looking vaguely more humanoid than he did, as long as one focused on the hair, eyes, and her curvy shape that the most voluptuous humans of the Earth would envy. If one looked at the hands and feet which were waving tendrils adorned with wicked claws, the resemblance cracked. So too did it with her face shifting from ape-like maws to those of a great wolf, or a great panther whenever the whims suited her.

**And how are you enjoying your stay, Mors?**

It was uncanny how the twin faces of the Daemon-Sultan could speak in unity, simultaneously two voices and one voice and no sound at all.

**_Well enough. It's....a place._ **

The Arkhanazun grinned, his face shifting briefly into a form much less human, eyes within eyes within eyes and fangs and smiles as he let out a great bark of laughter. The Arkhalai simply brushed some of her reddish flame-hair out of her eyes.

Her smiles, for now she had three mouths, each of a shape that could not fit in a roughly humanoid face and yet managed were cold.

**Just a place? Careful, you had best not insult your hosts, little Endless. One might see that as....ungrateful.**

**_I....i didn't-_** the Arkhalai laughed, one of the twelve-tendriled hands slipping around her shoulder in something both friendly and feeling more possessive a touch than anything else.

**I was kidding, dear. There's not many places for you to go, right now.**

**_N-no, no there aren't._** Death hated feeling fear but there was no other emotion to feel in this place, when one of the two eldest of the Ten Thousand forms had her hands on her shoulder, when her emotions and thoughts, always superlatively powerful, fastened on Death's being and showed her terrible visions of what had happened before and would happen again. 

**It gets lonely, doesn't it dear? Having no family and but yourself to be here and to do things?**

Death nodded, tears darkening her eyes and making her vision mercifully somewhat blurry.

**You are always welcome here, little Endless. I wonder why the rest of your family go by that name? They are not Endless, only you are....for now.**

Death's tremors intensified as the tendrils slowly withdrew and the being removed her hand, stepping back.

The Arkhanazun then raised his hand and pointed and she looked along that direction, seeing another entity of the same bleached-bone hue as her own skin, save that the eyes were a horribly familiar burning gold like suns, and her teeth bright fangs far too straight and long for her jaws when she opened them.

RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

Death awoke, pressing herself more tightly into Raven's body. She hated dreams of that place. It was......it was not nice. Much of her....experiences...had been shaped there in the hands of entities whose nature defied ready description and yet the closest she could think of them was somewhere between the Presence, her younger brother, and the more unpleasantly sadistic types of mortals. The twin faces of the Ten Thousand Formed monster, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, soul and messenger of the Outer Gods. She had seen them, she had.....

Her fists clenched, in her gloves. It wasn't just the golden glowing eyes that had awoken her and the sense of dreadful familiarity with that of another entity she knew well, it was that her head was hurting again with a terrible migraine that led to tears flowing down her face. This.....this was not good.

The pain awoke Raven, who looked blearily at the clock. Just after half-past three in the morning but the pain her love felt was something that knifed into her senses. Sharp, like a blade to the heart. Death's voice was whimpering, and that sent a sudden sharp stab of fear to go with the blade-feeling, one that had Raven's body prickling and her magic creeping out of her control as if she were fourteen again, newly come to an alien world that was her mother's but not hers and she had never truly felt it could be.

She reached out to touch Death cautiously and then Death's wings manifested and her face brushed against the feathers and she found herself held spellbound, seeing what Death saw as she slipped into a kind of trance, awed and horrified at the sights that were revealed, the kind of vision and presence that were the normal elements of those entities of concept and duality whose presence is the very concept itself in terms absolute and unrelenting called the Endless.

REALM OF DESTINY OF THE ENDLESS:

Yeneli blinked, realizing in a sudden jolting moment that she was present in the Garden of the Forking Paths, seeing the statues. Her heart beat slightly faster at the sight of her love's statue, and the image of pain and sorrow that gripped her with her wings flaring into full visible nature. The beat changed and her eye twitched slightly and her fists clenched at the sight of the being ripping at her jaw with a hook who wore her face, and had once been slightly distinct.

_**Well, we're here then.** _

Destiny of the Endless nodded.

_You would kill the demoness that has my sister's love._

_**The one that enslaved her, yes.** _

**_You will not do this._ **

_Who will stop me, you? If your writ was abso-_

She was on her knees, eyes frozen, feeling like a statue to match those of the seven Endless at the slightest motion of Destiny's fingers.

_Yes, me. The demoness and her actions have brought the universe to the brink of ruin, but they hold in it an element of its salvation as well, hinged on choices. If you kill her, you kill my sister, as she was, and in a way that she can never return to who she was. If you let her live, then the thing of madness that seeks to fasten its claws here will grasp but smoke and find itself driven into and beyond the elements of the Wall that restricts its kind from direct ingress._

**_So I can't kill Trigon's little bastard?_ **

_No._

Yeneli's hands clenched her sword and she took a great breath, shuddering, and then more than slightly fearful. Destiny had no eyes to see and yet the hint of his displeasure was like a great tsunami poised to make landfall, and here, in the Garden, she was his captive more than anything else. Here, there was but one law and one will, and it was not hers.

_You killed one of my sisters and came very near to killing the one you see as nothing more than the being you knew from the beginning. I am usually condemned to watch, but watching does not mean that I accept such things, nor that I forgive them._

**_I won't go back to that damned book, Destiny of the Endless. I cannot be so easily entrapped again. The mad creature that awoke me from the grave has made sure of it._ **

_I am aware of this, Yeneli of Muspelheim, Yet I will give you but one warning. Even when reality has reasserted itself, when the binding falls, when my book's writ returns, I have had the freedom to do what I have long wished to do. I have rewritten a few of its pages._

_So let me give you but the one warning, and the one warning only. Go near any of my siblings with murder in your heart again and you'll wish for the kindness and the mercy of my brother's books._

With that his fist clenched and suddenly she was on an island with a vast T-shaped tower, and it was after the dawn.

Her presence set off mystic alarms and she looked up to see a boy in jeans and a black T-shirt with a red symbol of unknown alien nature, a girl clad in a leotard intermixed with armor, and a being blurring with the power of the Speed Force moving toward her. She shuddered, not from them, but from the awareness that things would not be near so simple as she had wished them to be.

And from something strange. A portal of light like that emitted by dead stars spat out a blade that ripped out and tore her cheek to the bone. Blood sprayed, far more than the wound should have given and into a goblet that vanished into another rippling thing of light. She was woozy for a picosecond, then her regeneration and her flesh made anew the wound before the Titans perceived it.

In the wake of that, her eyes went beyond the first Titans, who were moving in swiftness, and fastened on two more stepping from the doors of the tower. One was shorter than the other though neither were tall. The first made her eyes narrow with her purple hair and that white dress that made her seelm like she was trying to be 'pure', as if a spawn of that demon was capable of the feat.

And then her eyes widened when she saw _her,_ and the look on _her_ face in those dark eyes was one of misty-eyed reactions that turned into a blend of sorrow, and what was worse...horror.

TEMPLE AZARATH:

Delirium of the Endless moved her arms like a conductor, weaving elements of her realm around the being that trembled on her throne, seeing for a moment the elements of what her brother Dream would have seen as elements of Story and of his sphere. This they were and yet here, in this place, the thing that intended to kill her sister as she had been was in her power and in her realm and so were these elements of her brother's. Power flowed out and she danced with glee and gaiety that did not quite match, until the entity fell from the throne onto her knees, clutching her head so hard that blood dripped out, silver in hue, and the entity's mouth opened in what was at first a silent wail and then a two-voiced primordial foghorn bellow echoed, like a trumpet, two more songs of wrath and ruin echoing before Delirium's dance stopped, the creature's hands within her gauntlets clenched against the floor.

A low rumbling growl echoed from her mouth, two-voiced, and her eyes glowed with the light of dead stars as she turned to look at the youngest of the Endless, who was older than Gods, and smiling at her with joy as her hands were clasped together in front of her face.

Her voices were thicker and guttural as she rasped:

**Mine the hands that kill, mine the hands that heal,**

**mine the hands that stilled the wine-dark sea.**

**Mine is the house of pain, mine the hands that stilled the lightning-flash**

**mine the will that took the world of ashes and remade it into ivory and gold.**

She raised herself to her feet and the Temple Azarath tilted again, and from its place as a hovering dimension between dimensions it shifted and became a great world, a kind of super-earth woven of ivory and gold, the dark green of the creature's armor changing, as her height and bulk and weight seemed to shift, becoming seemingly as a being of three dimensions where everything else seemed for a moment two, drawn in pencil and ink, and shaped with the care of a team of writers.

The creature looked at Delirium of the Endless with a mixture of anger and rage and with a wary respect honed from the awareness of what this deceptively small 'child' had done and how she'd done it.

The growling snarls remained constant and echoed at every fabric of what had been the Temple Azarath and now what it had always been and yet never was.

**You have awakened me in fullness, stripling of the seven, freed of the burden of conforming to laws of a realm not my own, and caught in the prison of all of this again in spite of that which I so seldom experience.**

The entity leaned forward, Delirium's gaze still that of a sweet smile, her hair changing from the quasi-afro to the punk hairstyle with half her head shaven and her hair trailing to her waist.

**When your sister is screaming for mercy and I reshape her into my own image and my own likeness, life everlasting and she is driven mad and goes forth to torment others with the nature of her own remaking, as I do myself in my own spheres, I will remind her that it was her youngest sister who betrayed her into my hands, and gave me the tools to do this.**

With that the thing snarled again and focused a brief force outward, where on Titans Island the fire that shaped itself into Yeneli did not prevent the sudden appearance of a strange blade from nowhere that sliced into her cheek and caught the blood that fountained outward in a goblet-like shape, one that reappeared. Such was the reward of defiance.

Delirium only left a bit later, singing to herself:

_ShE's goNa GeT yOu! ShE's GonNa gEt YoU!_

The creature snarled and beat her chest in a simian-like posture, her rings flashing with brilliant light.

The snarl echoed in Azarath as its winds, and in Zandia, what had already been a temple and an island that was wrought into a golden peninsula was rewritten into a vast fortress where the spires reached high into the skies, wrought into shapes of terrible hue of seeming ivory and gold.

APOKOLIPS:

As Highfather and Darkseid stood over the toppled Yuga Khan, a brilliant flash of light pierced the darnkness and smog around Apokolips, as a being that seemed a woman clad in Earth-clothes descended from the light, transforming in the process from a being of human shape to something not human in any save a very loose sense. Twenty-five feet tall, clad in brilliant silver armor, with a dark ankh on her breastplate, her skin was the hue of bone and her eyes were a constellation of nine burning golden suns, as she turned to Darkseid and to Highfather, her gaze turning to Yuga Khan.

**Gentlemen, if you don't mind, I'll be taking him.**

_**Where do you intend to take my father?** _

**Back to the prison where he belongs, Uxas of Apokolips. Alone among my kind, the Source Wall has never been a barrier to me, for my power is other than that of our homeworld, in truth, though augmented by its prowess and that of the Oath.**

**We are not enemies, we are allies. My negligence created a catastrophe for your multiverse, and I am here to repair that mistake.**

When Darkseid, not quite trusting the entity, chose to summon his Omega effect, the being dismissively formed a small circular shield of something like and yet very unlike pyroclastic smoke, smoke that was greyish from the way the lightning interwove within it. The Omega Effect collided with it and Darkseid felt a fuindamental chill matched by that of his equal, Highfather, at seeing the Omega Effect that was launched at her _quite literally unmade as if it had never been and would never be._ The cold smile on her lips was followed by a sudden column of light forming around her and the unconscious and wounded Yuga Khan, and in that light the two vanished.

SOURCE WALL:

Yuga Khan blinked to awareness as he found himself near the rift in the Wall, where there were tears in reality, new tears. Hovering before him in space was another giant, kindred to the one that had awakened Perpetua and freed him.

 **You have done your multiverse a service. You've contained Mors' errant spawn and weakened her such that containing her will be well within the remit of the Endless without the bother of a rehash of a poorly structured concept that should never have been written.**

Yuga Khan's eyes were hostile and he sought to extend his draining to the arrogant stripling of the Oathbound, only to find himself stunned when the draining encountered a void and a nothingness it could not reach.

The constellation-eyed monster tutted, a sound that should not have been audible in the depths of space and yet it, like the words that had been spoken to him, was.

**Nothing exists that can harm me. I am the Hammer of Doom, the Unmaker, the bane of the Undying Flames and the greatest soldier of my father's empire, though I shun it and its ways. I command the power that tore those holes you see, and as it destroys all else that it touches, that which summons it and is not destroyed by it must be as indestructible as it is destructive. Only one thing can grant me an ending, when it awakens from its dream, when my Unmaking caresses its dreams and renders them Waking.**

**You are not he, Yuga Khan, first King of the dark lands of Tyranny.**

Her right hand was raised, palm visible in her gauntlet, a brilliant and terrible whitish-yellow light forming.

_What my maddened kinswoman has unleashes is too far advanced to be readily halted without spending more effort on this multiverse than I wish to spend, alas. I was too slow, another thing to atone for. Had I come but a year ago none of this would have happened. Let your fate be the first lesson in why your multiverse has this wall, and why you are one of its cornerstones. You shield your universes with your flesh, Yuga Khan. My thanks for your service._

The light ripped outward and then Yuga Khan found himself undergoing the same process, rewoven anew into a Celestial Giant, mouth caught in a silent scream, hands reaching out to try to throttle the giant that hovered in space, and as he was reshaped, the wounds torn in reality were given enough concealment that their nature would not damage the structure, for what was carved by the lightning-smoke could not be repaired even by the hands of its summoner.

She smiled, broadly, then returned to the Earth.

The youngest of the Endless had caused her sister to slip gears and the effects resonated up and down time and space. How strange, she reflected, that a multiverse that believed insanity and madness to be a thing that caused evil was to be spared understanding of greater horrors from the eyes of madness, but such was the case when metaphysical systems clashed with each other. It was akin to tectonic plates, and those moved but slightly and cities fell to ruin in their wake.

TITANS ISLAND:

The Titans moved toward her and she raised her right hand and formed a rune of Muspelli-origin in the air in a shape that was and wasn't fire. For a brief moment in time they were held suspended in motion, save her love and the demoness who bound her, who was freed because of the interwoven and enmeshed elements.

She spoke words that her presence, in a distant and alien fashion as the entity Despair had awoken in an old poet, an old song meant for her love:

_**Out of the nothingness of sleep, the slow dreams of eternity,** _

_**there was a thunder on the deep, I came because you called to me.** _

She spread her hands wide, as the demoness looked at her with shock and wonder, realizing immediately who she was and what she was.

_**I broke the night's primeval bars, I dared the old abysmal curse.** _

_**I flashed through ranks of frightened stars, suddenly on the universe!** _

_**Eternal silences were broken, Hell become Heaven as I passed.** _

Another spell and she drew something that had been taken by her from the broken body of Death, in the moment before the change, and preserved somehow in Dream's book after all those aeons. A ring, beautiful and dark as night, adorned with a jewel that blended red and green and silver, a thing of no mortal make but of the conjuration of the second of the seven herself. 

_**What shall I give you as a token, a sign that we have met at last?** _

The jewel flashed and Death's face became something stiff and frozen, as she continued:

_**I shall break and forge the stars anew, shatter the heavens with a song!** _

_**Immortal in my love for you, for I love you very strong.** _

Her tread was in motion, moving past the Speed Force wielder who would have impacted her with enough force to knock her on her back smoothly, ducking beneath the lasso of the Themysciran, weaving past two streaks of reddish light from the boy with the red pentagon on his shirt.

_**Your mouth shall mock the old and wise, your laugh fill the world in flame.** _

_**I shall write upon the shrinking skies, the scarlet splendor of your name.** _

_**Till Heaven cracks and Hell thereunder dies in her ultimate mad fire-**_ and her eyes met Raven's with an extremely overt glare of malice.

_**And darkness fall with scornful thunder on the dreams of men and men's desire.** _

By then she was next to them and she placed the ring on her finger, as Death looked and her lower lip trembled slightly, fists clenching, and heart aching in a terrible pain that caused her to do something that marred the intended effect of the last words, another quote that Despair, with her face, had put as the capstone of a tale that ached with her presence, and her presence within the Endless part of her had become. In the words of a man become elderly by the malice of an incarnate deity and speaking to his wife and to her entreaties, she spoke words modified slightly by the circumstances:

_**I trode a hard road, and I have come as I could.** _

Then as Death looked at her heart, aching with that same pain burned as if the entity that stood before her held the blade now in its scabbard in her heart once more and as she swooned into darkness she suddenly remembered _everything._

And in that instance the spell that held the Titans suspended in time snapped and the Titans recovered speed with the deftness of people who'd fought those who could manipulate time before, and as Raven moved to keep Death's head from striking the floor and glared at her, the Titans that faced her moved with swiftness as she sighed and drew the blade that had slain Despair from the scabbard and with a face like stone ignited its fires.

REALM OF DELIRIUM:

Delirium danced in joy. She felt the immensity of the thing whose presence was like a great thunderstorm in her realm, yet in it, it was not the master of this place but she. She'd become lost here once, and her brother had summoned a team of those lost in her realm to rescue her, and that feat had won them relief. Now freed of being lost, Delirium was a thousand shapes and she was a singularity, emptiness illuminated by brilliant light and seeming to devour all that it wished. The thundercloud's presence rippled and lightning flashed and in her presence it became a cloud of butterflies.

Delirium, in her change since Delight, had seen the parts of the universe that only her sister Death had seen, she'd seen the Halls and seen a glimpse of the Daemon-Sultan that dreamed. She had seen the father of these Kelzhandari and his brother and seen his blade and his brother's terrible witchery on the field of blood. She'd seen countless worlds, seen a reality where she was youngest of seven, elder than gods, absolute power within her domain, and yet a simple character in panels in a comic book, an arc of the _Sandman Universe_ in an alternate universe. Where she was text on a computer screen written on a laptop on a site called _Archive of Our Own,_ the text reshaped into a comic book and back into a realm of endless kaleidoscopic fog and the brooding menace of a horror from _Beyond_ whose very restraint had been grasped and was within her power to wield. Dream got to do this all the time, even Desire did. On a few occasions, Despair had. Delirium had never done this before, and it felt such _fun_ she secretly vowed for more such things.

METROPOLIS:

The skies lit for a moment like a second Sun that blazed around the world and occluded the light of the Sun in a purity of whitish-yellow light that felt like the inverse of an eclipse. The light fell like lightning from the skies, and a woman of seemingly human shape stood up, with two golden eyes. It was a small thing to send a careful sounding out that would make humans and other things with power disinterested in her appearance. Hilariously so, if she let herself think that way but she was not the Shadow-woman so she did not. Instead she plucked at her sleeve and strode into Metropolis, enjoying for a time the appearance of the city of Tomorrow. It reminded her of another world where her sibling had first encountered this kind of universe, had rewoven it so they were part of its fabric from the beginning and worked as great cosmic forces whenever good and evil needed to take a break from dogfighting each other.

This was neither that world, nor its multiverse, but it didn't matter. Metropolis was always clean and optimistic, cities as they could be and could aspire to be. A city worthy of a Superman.

As it turned out, Delirium's casual manipulation of her sister had brought out of a book that held her another being, a being of fiction within fiction in one sense. The Queen of Fables, a being of superlatively powerful magic. That being sensed her, and she had sensed the Queen but did not care. Mages of individual universes might be potent but they were less than ants in her eyes.

The Queen found her magic and her presence addictive, and it was with the jerking motions of a drug addict that she began to move and cast magic, streams of mist that became tendrils of light with jagged edges like ice. The mage-woman with the sun-eyes found one of the tendrils seeking to close about her wrist, another about her neck, and another about her foot. Another attempt to drain and to harm that which nothing in existence could. She sighed.

A single motion of her fingers later the tendrils shattered with an eerie howl that ripped into the ears that heard it, and then she saw the mage giving her an indulgent smile. With that and the motions and the first stirring of light that began to take a form of something like lightning that felt fundamentally _wrong,_ as if the material fabric of the universe struggled against it and was _unmade_ and in a way that it had never been, she did the entirely sensible thing and teleported away in a flash, finding herself subsequently in a great clash against Vandal Savage as she exorcised her frustration and fear on a target who proved all too uncannily adept at dealing with her.

WATCHTOWER:

"Are you sure this can work?"

Surtr shrugged.

_**I'm not sure of anything. Right now the first of the seven's realm is in a state of flux it has not been since the last time his sister discarded her function. There is freedom in this, and there is danger. What I have suggested should work, given your power and mine with it, and that the Norns and the first of the seven are lending the fullness of a power that seldom has need to display its full strength to re-establish what should be.** _

_**Odin has faced the sons of Yahweh together, two beings whose combined presence matches the Presence at her height, and did so on equal terms. He did so from the same determination that you shall face here.** _

Then his magma-like face cracked that eerie smile that had several among the League shuddering.

_**Yet mighty as he was, and as they are, I am older than them both. The sons of Yahweh owe their power as much to their father's ascension as anything else, yet it is not the new gods that are in the greatest ascension. The Old Ones walk, and where the sons of Asgard and Vanaheim may come prepared to face your kind, they are not to face me. Especially-and his hand closed on the hilt of his blade-when I wield the Freyr-bane, a weapon that at the end of all things shall burn your world in ashes as I await the embrace of the second of the Seven and the moment of luxurious non-existence, my task done.** _

His eyes and Diana's met and she nodded as he spoke-she has fought a blade of its kindred, and she knows of its power. The Justice Society did not face me with this blade, merely an ordinary weapon of my armory. Those are dangerous enough. This, this is the blade of Ragnarok. Its omen will goad Odin and the Aesir, it will make their carefully laid plans run afoul of the reminder that Wyrd cannot be denied.

'You could destroy our world with that thing!' It was the Speed Force wielder who objected.

 _ **Yes I could,** _said Surtr, calmly. _ **I could destroy it, but I do not think it is the will of Destiny of the Endless, whose writ is powerful and whom even a state of freedom like this cannot readily deny, that his sister be called to her task in that shape here.** _

"Very well."

They looked at the calendar.

_**Today is the first day of the week, the day of the Sun. On the fourth, Odin's day, he shall ride with his Wild Hunt and Frejya at his side, and there shall be battle in Turtle Island against them. Gird yourselves, you have not known war, sons of Midgard, until you have faced the lords of Asgard in their fury!** _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem is The Call, by Rupert Brooke. One of my favorite poems.


	11. A Fire-Bell in the Night:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death remembers when she almost died, how she recovered, and then has a very painful reunion with a ghost that retook form and flesh.

TITANS TOWER, SUNDAY AFTERNOON:

Death fell to the ground in a sudden swoon that left a crater where she struck and caused a tremor that echoed through Jump City (a tremor less grievous for the not so quiet actions of Tara Markov, who decided that her quest for a normal life had proven futile in the end, and took the first of a set of longer steps back down a path she never particularly wanted to go in sparing the city the impact of the sudden earthquake that would have been one of the most destructive in California beside the Big One).

Yeneli stared at her in blank shock, jaw moving slightly, mouthing words in an ancient version of her culture's language, that from the very first universe. She felt a deep and abiding level of resentment at how readily Raven touched her love, and her hand instinctively went to the blade, and then she remembered when last the blade had been used around the Endless. And in that sudden moment a chill crawled up her spine and the embodiment of the primordial magma forces froze, her clawed hand around the hilt and let the blade go, as her head dipped downward in a sudden spasm of recognition and of grief.

THE REALM OF DESPAIR, THREE AND A HALF BILLION YEARS AGO:

Death and Despair of the Endless were in a quiet conversation when it began. Death loved her younger sister as much as Dream and her got along in those days, and she was the only one the icy and brittle Death felt comfortable around, for of them all, Despair had seen her most and knew most of what was truly within her heart. Despair was neither cold nor malevolent, of the Endless she was the most comforting besides Death and her younger brother. It was the last phase of the first Despair's life, and it was the very first universe, so Death had only a horrid confusion at appearing not just as her sister, but in her job (and refusing to speak the words of ill omen aloud).

Since her engagement had been spurned at blade-point by the wrath of the primordial magma-figure she'd sought to betrothe herself to, she'd felt that brittleness intensify, though in another couple hundred million years one of the very first, primitive Coluans would speak words to her that would alter her life and her function and bring about a pattern that would make her unlike all the other Endless, freer than them in most ways, and yet in spite of having no rules, having shackles of her own as firm as those of iron around a creature of Faerie. It was at its apex in her calm and stoic face, in her quiet answers to her sister's questions, in her resisting (and hating herself for a long time thereafter, for 200 million more years to be precise) the impulse to stroke her sister's hair, to feel her sister's life before the rest called itself forth.

Just before it had happened, Desire had popped in, and this was a point where Death had actually tried to repair their relationship, if awkwardly and stiffly, where Desire knew little better how to respond. Despair had watched the two with a look of genuine amusement on her face at the time, even as Desire sniffed, a movement oddly human for the personification of the concept of Want, and that long before humans existed. That was the beginning of the beginning, though none of them knew it yet.

When it began the realm of Despair, ordinarily a place where there was only a faintly musty odor in her shadow, an odor that reeked of fallen empires and dancing on the grave of kings, began to feel a dismal and dreadful heat. It was a heat that was horridly familiar, and it was followed by a line that was carved, a brilliant reddish line like magma , a line carved by a terrible blade. One of the Muspell-blades, the weapons that were the concentrated might of the realm of World-Destruction, a sphere where Death's spheres met those of Dream and Destruction, charged in magic and unlike any of the other Nine Realms save its polar opposite, Niflheim, which was in many ways a metaphor of the Sunless Lands.

That had been but one of the many things that had entranced Death about Yeneli and drawn her to her, and her heart that ached with the memory of the broken engagement felt a strange hope at first, and then it dawned on her just why she'd come here and she looked in mute horror as the line ripped into the heart of the realm of Despair erupted outward in a wave of fire and fury.

Like a figure meant to lay low Gods and Goddesses and Realms entire strode Yeneli, clad in golden armor, a being of the primordial lifeblood of planets and stars made manifest. Angles did not truly exist for such a being, only a concept raw and unbounded, save that she had a form vaguely humanoid and in her right hand an elaborately adorned hilt that held a blade that burned with a terrible heat. She stood before three of the Endless together, entities so mighty that even the mightiest of aspiring conquerors of all existence could not threaten them unless they sought to redefine the very terms and concepts of reality itself.

Only Death grasped it then with that sick awareness of her function that they stood before such a being, that in her smile was malice and wrath and ruin, and in her blade, a thing had been held impossible.

 ** _I know your heart, Desire of the Endless,_** words spoken that sealed in damnation and the sharp edge of a blade the fate of a being who was the focus of all the elements of hope and of the loss of hope, of loss and of grief.

 ** _There is but one being in creation you love unironically, absolutely, without reservation. One being alone you would truly mourn._** She was a giant, towering over the Endless even in their own realms, and in her heat the mirrors of Despair became brittle and shattered and her rats shriveled to ashes and bone.

With that she laughed then, a laughter cold and menacing and Desire's eyes suddenly turned to Despair and in a single agonized shout xie tried to shield xir sister with xir own body but the blade lanced out and struck clean into the heart of Despair of the Endless, who stared at it in stupefied horror. At first she'd expected the realities of trying to take down a concept would render this null and void, but the blade had struck, struck cleanly, and burned with its dreadful heat clean through her and she felt her entire concept and self beginning to unravel.

Despair stared blankly at the monster, and heard its laughter, and then in darkness there was a brilliant golden ankh, and a voice of unending kindliness that spoke:

 ** _I'm so sorry, my sister. Take my hand._** And the most beautiful, lovely eyes she'd ever seen, full of an emotion that flowered briefly in a way that it would for all others, for ideas and bacteria, for planets and for stars. For mortals and for immortals. Eyes, two of which were endless pools of darkness and infinitiy on wings, giving her the kindliest expression that she would ever know and then she never knew anything again, as a sound of wings filled the realm. From there, Despair of the Endless's body slumped forward as the blade withdrew, no blood on a blade of fire, only a great scorched mark.

Desire fell to xir knees screaming in denial and in rage, and the monster that had slain xir sister laughed with a voice of thunder and doom, and then she turned to her.

 _ **Now you know what it is to feel this,**_ spoke the creature, and she raised the blade.

_**Now, I shall show you how it is that the Endless can end....** _

Desire had moved too slowly to protect Despair, as had Death, but this time, Death had a split second to decide. To decide if the animosity over heartbreak and the Mercy was worth anything, and yet.....it was nothing to Death to move suddenly and then Desire watched as her wings fountained into existence and the same terrible blade ripped through her heart and her back, as she felt nothing so much as a soothing love and a quiet: **_I love you_** echoed in xir ears and mind.

The creature snarled at first and then gasped, blankly, as she realized who was on the edge of her blade, who the blade had struck. Gasped, and then laughed, in deliberate malice and told her: _**I have slain Despair, now I shall burn another witch. It is said in a text older than the oldest 'and with strange aeons death shall die.' I am strange aeons, my former beloved. Now, burn.**_ It was then that her body began to see strands of grey spiderwebbing through her immaterial flesh of magma-hue, and that what had been heated with a dreadful heat felt dreadfully clammy, her shadow beginning to cast an odor. She groaned in a dual-voiced sound that echoed, then as she fell back, the horrid transformation began, her blade still burning with eldritch heat and light. but took one last time to pull the blade back and then placed her hand on Death's back and smiled cruelly as she forced the blade clear through her, the look of malicious glee a thing that held Death spellbound and in a trance, the blade burning within her even as the being reeled back, the transformation proceeding with a dismal swiftness.

The creature roared in agonized pain and her face became frozen beneath the existence of now-black hair as the face of the new Despair, fangs matching perfectly, their sister transformed into a being of more monstrous shape, greyish like pumice. She transformed, a punishment for her deed, for the slaying of Despair, that would never truly end. The first sight of the new Despair of the Endless was Death frozen before herself and Desire, their twin's eyes in horrified frozen position at a blade of fire that dug deep into her heart, producing a horrid kind of scorched smell. Parts of the feathers on her wings burned but Death remained frozen, as if she could not move.

Their older brother came in, then, clad in his armor and stared stricken at his sister.

 _I made this realm_ , he mused _. My siblings added their natures to it, but its core is of me, and of my power._

He did not know that Death could fully hear this, nor did they fully know that the blade's flames had taken with it a part of what was equivalent to Death's own heart, a part that would imperfectly and incompletely heal (and be why every one of her incarnations in a world that thought was said to have heart problems that ultimately killed them at the end of that single day).

A magnificent blade, and yet it....he was sorrowful then and the first strand in a decision that would ripple many billions of years later was sown then. His hand reached to grasp the hilt, and as he pulled Death's frozen body remained locked in a silent scream until the blazing blade was removed from her heart, leaving a smoking and charred hole in her body, and then, only then, with parts of her feathers cinders that trailed ash and ash and what were equivalents of the iridescent blood of an Endless turned to a horrid black sludge-like substance dripping from her, did she fall backwards, landing in Despair's realm with a sudden crashing sound.

Death hovered in a strange fever-like state for what was for the Endless a short span of time, a couple million years, time in which her function was inconsistent, years of feast or famine. No deaths and no births or baby and death booms. She hovered in Destiny's garden, as her own realm was unstable and the dead for a time could walk and those who rested within her lands awoke. The other Endless remained uncertain, for while Despair had been buried and in her own funeral and wake, a being who was like Death from the far future had come, a being with dark eyes and kindness and sweetness. Words spoken that gave meaning and peace to each person as they needed heard.

In later years, after she remembered, Death would confess that it was her future self who had gone back in time to speak, that it was the only time she had seen her first family since.....and then she fell silent. A few million years of Death in a feverish state, neither able to heal and due to her curse, unable to truly die. None of the Endless could help her, even Destiny, who sought in his own ways to do things but found that his efforts in his own realm had run into something that left him puzzled. He saw inklings of a solution that would happen improbably, impossibly distant, when the being that had severed her heart and slain their sister would return from the grave, and something of the _outside_ would intervene in ways that had no clear outcome even to him.

It was in this element of bemusement, powerlessness, _ignorance_ that Destiny watched his sister slowly heal as her body and her nature permitted her to do so. The hole closed, the mutilated heart stitched back together, and she came back to awakening with a terrible scream that echoed in his maze and in later incarnations shaped it in specific ways and contexts with a voice that sounded impossible and was yet real. Death had awoken and retreated into herself, behind a brittle maze that nothing, not even Destruction or Dream, could penetrate, leaving her isolated and away from them all, until the Coluan had spoken the words to her and something slowly, truthfully, changed in the outward shape of what she showed to mortals.

What Destiny alone among his siblings knew was that the first stabbing, which had been marked with uncomprehending rejection and then followed by another with deliberate intent to kill had shattered their sister deeply, moreso than the terrible actions of the demon Trigon (whom Destiny had quietly added in one of the few times he broke his own rules to add something intentionally to his book, something that would echo in all the later iterations of the Endless). Death had seen the one and only person she had truly _loved_ as a being more than than just her function seek to kill her and to kill her with a deliberate joy in the action.

It was right, Destiny believed, that their family had this rule. Dream had shown that with Kilalla of the Glow, even if he would not remember his own rules and would bring about downfalls again and again in the process. The sight of Despair killed by a burning blade to the heart and Death frozen in Despair's realm, a blade burning into her very being a wound that would leave her a being of smiles that concealed inward shame and an agony that burned with a terrible heat, it confirmed the necessity and the reason for all else that went with it.

It did not help that Death had awoken in his garden with the memory of a terrible fever and strange dreams of which she'd spoken little and with only a partial memory, of the blade raised and striking her heart. Mortals had such responses to events, the Endless......it jolted them all. One of their number had been murdered, another brought near to unmaking, and with gaps in her memory, The Endless, who had taken their status for granted up to that point, now all felt mortal. And Death, who in later lifetimes would know beyond all doubt that nothing could ever truly end her, nor would anything ever truly do so, would spend the entirety of her life until existence had ended that first time secretly doubting that the belief of all her family, even the Prodigal, that she would outlive the world was true.

THE DREAMING:

On his throne, Dream of the Endless brooded in quietness, brushing his chin with his fingers.

His sister had slipped into his realm, partially, but he was troubled. That memory was not the one of their time, when the Jotunn had plunged a lesser blade into her heart and she had trembled in a semi-conscious state that had nearly unraveled her realm altogether for a few thousand years before setting it to rights as if it had never truly been. He caught a glimpse, if a small one, of the very _first_ version of them, and the memory of his prior self, tall and brooding and dark had felt achingly familiar and yet vaguely _wrong._ The same emotions that clustered around, in retrospect, the form of the jotunn called from the book in his Library.

Dream brooded more quietly still, and in this Daniel Hall and Morpheus were much the same. He understood all too well, even if he had no real wish to.

TITANS TOWER:

Later that day, Death awoke on the couch where Raven had placed her, in that same unconscious state. Only Raven and Starfire could move her when she was like this, even Yeneli, who had tried three times, had failed every single time, and that in spite of the ring. She had felt the presence of her brother's realm, of what it was to be in the Dreaming, not merely in a dream. She had dreamed in truth, a thing she seldom did outside of this time here, in this world. Only on other worlds and in other areas where she had her one mortal day, in the nightime of that day whenever she did sleep. It had felt strange, and even wondrous. Yet now she remembered, and her heart ached and felt empty, her hand instinctively there, her fist clenching tightly and her teeth gritting slightly.

Her dark eyes turned to the Jotunn that stood before her, clad in armor, hand on the hilt of a terribly familiar blade.

 ** _You,_** she said, simply.

The Ivjida nodded. **_Me._ **

**_You shouldn't be here. You....you were...._ **

**_And here I am, love._ **

**_Love?_ _Y_ _ou tried to kill me when we last saw each other. That blade your hand's on was in my chest, you tried to kill me, to unmake me. The last word I heard from your lips was 'burn.'_ **

The Ividja's face paled, insofar as a being like her could.

_**That is true, I did say that, and I meant it.** _

Death's gaze was not kind, it was one of sheer and abiding anger and all in the room trembled, for the wrath of Death was not a thing to be tempted lightly. Only Death knew the fuller elements and Raven and Starfire the partial ones, and even if every instinct in Donna's Amazonian training said to attack the being, that same training taught her to 'feel' the mystic potential of threats that could wield magic. This being 'felt' like trying to fight one of the Lords of Chaos in the flesh, and even Donna Troy was not so foolhardy as to leap into _that_ kind of fight. All of a sudden, Donna understood all too well how much such a being could have withstood the Godkiller.

_**I have changed, love.** _

_**Stop using that word.** _

_**What word?** _

_**You know the one. Love. You don't love me. You don't love someone and try to murder them, even in passion. And that wasn't passion, that was cold-blooded murder.** _

The Ivjida looked at her with sorrow.

_**As I said, I have changed.** _

_**Congratulations. You're thirteen thousand three hundred and sixty two universes, each one of which was a minimum of a trillion years in existence, too damned late.** _

Death's fists clenched.

**_No, I won't take you. Not for a very long time. You destroyed that when you murdered my sister and tried to kill Desire._ **

Yeneli's face changed from sorrow to wrath, the heat overloading the air conditioning in Titans Tower.

_**You don't lecture me on preserving that treacherous bitch's life. She manipulated us both. You didn't take my blade because you were her sister, she made you do it. She will pay for that, mark my words. The way she would have if she had n-** _

Death's glare was still more intense, and as she rose to her feet, even with the binding, even with all else, Yeneli suddenly felt very small and insignificant.

_**Do. not. threaten. my. family. ever. again.** _

Yeneli nodded, frantically, almost like a bobblehead doll. _**Very well....Hel.** _

She looked around.

_**You have bad things after you. One of them is the Aesir, but I suspect my dear uncle, the version of him.....that long from the one I knew....will be there to handle that. Against his blade, the Asabane, nothing can withstand that given enough focus. It is the sheer concentrated essence of your brother's function in the rawest sense. So I will be content to let that mess sort itself out.** _

Her eyes were drawn to the white streak in Death's hair.

_**That streak is a result of one of** _ **them** _**, the ones from the** _ **Outside.** _**She aims to destroy you.** _

Her gaze turned to Raven.

_**You....you bound her. The words she spoke to me are a result of her being enslaved by you. The moment she's free, I will talk to her again of what was, and we will see who she truly wishes for.** _

She did not smile, now, she made a low and rumbling sound of anticipation. **_Absent that feather, demoness, my blade, the one that destroyed Despair, would carve your heart out as it did hers. You have enslaved a being of value, and fancy yourself anything but the very heir of your father, the Dispersed one, last of the Empire of Tears._ **

She turned to the Titans.

**_If you have a guest room, it will be mine until I say otherwise._ **

Then her gaze turned back to Raven.

_**As soon as she's freed of that accursed binding, demoness, you and I.....we have a date with destiny, with vengeance for the foolish acts of those who committed deeds they considered great but were folly.** _

With that she vanished in a flash of fire and appeared in the guest room, which a casual wave of her hand and a spell remade to suit her wishes and her likeness. 

RAVEN'S BEDROOM, SUNDAY EVENING:

Death looked at Raven in a troubled sense, her jaw wibbling. She spoke softly, as she reached out to place her hands in Raven's.

**_Take me, please._ **

Her voice was soft and there was a sense of fragility in it that had Raven worried.

_Are you sure?_

Death nodded, eyes gleaming slightly as her jaw trembled again.

Starfire floated in. "Dick is....worried, and he said that he doesn't mind if...."

Death looked to her, and Starfire's feet hit the floor as she looked closely.

"You need this, don't you?"

Death nodded again and stood up and was soon exposed before them in her full glory, her ankh against her body, gleaming, passing through her clothes.

It was Starfire who floated up first, hovering over them and kissing Death as Raven stripped out of her dress and strode over to her, picking up with the kisses where Starfire left off as she removed her own clothes, watching Raven push Death on the bed, straddling her.

Part of Starfire still felt an undeniable rush at the thought that between herself and Raven, they'd tamed one of the seven primordial forces of the universe. She had been a slave, once, tortured by her sister and her cronies and allies in the Citadel and with the Gordanian brutes that had....hurt her. And now it was one of the Seven who kissed her, eagerly, it was her whose lips fastened between her legs and gripped her with that iron grip that made her wonder still at times just how much Raven actually _had_ that control or if she even did and it was all merely something Death humored because part of her hurt the way she had when she'd come to Earth and she'd merely grasped with desperation something that might make it stop. 

These weren't thoughts in words or sentences but flickers of emotion that were suppressed when Raven's hands slid along her body, when their bodies met and brushed against each other, these were things that could not flicker long when that tongue moved with a speed and a strength like nothing else. These were things that could not hold, either, against the dual weight of Raven's empathic loops and Death's sheer weight of being, a concept that still made her head ache if she tried to parse it for too long. It never took long when Death's lips and hands and tongue were at work. It was faster than Raven's, by an appreciable margin but that was only to be expected. And the way it felt, with that intensity....Starfire sagged into Raven's hands and then lowered herself to return the favor for Death, while Raven took her place, as her hands and her shadows caressed them both.

If nothing else, Starfire was grateful to the Endless for uncaging the fullness of who Raven was, and what she could do. She had suspected this, at points, but suspicions without evidence weren't worth a very great deal. The fullness of Raven's powers unleashed, extending around her body and that of Death, the snarls and growls and low and guttural moans from the shadows were less terrifying in a way when she knew more of them, and yet they were also no less so. Even at her most contained, before her ascension to mistress of the Malebolge, Raven was capable of rewriting the entire universe if she wished it.

And now, after that ascension, Raven was more powerful. Not near the Endless, but near the level of the Spectre, as her father before her had been. It was a moment of quiet caution among the Titans to reflect on that, to worry about the potential dangers. If more people knew just what the most powerful member of their team was capable of, her life might be at risk as all of theirs might be, in a different sense. Instead of Mumbo or at worst Deathstroke, it might be regular sparring matches against the likes of Mongul or the Atomic Skull....or might just be regular threesomes with one of the most beautiful entities in all of existence, who quite literally had beauty to die for.

Her life had changed immeasurably since she'd joined Raven that day, and she could not deny just how much it had changed for the better. Having Death herself caught in their mutual embrace, and content to be caught, and to be in their hands or mouths, knowing she brought the literal concept of Death to a trembling groaning incoherent mess with a few short and deft motions of fingers and tongues, that between her and Raven they had quite literally conquered a being, even if she let herself be, in a way that meant there were these times when reality and its tempests, and the elements that lurked in shadows in greater and lesser openness receded into the simple and hedonistic elements here.

No monsters that appeared in fire and caused her to swoon and revealed that the stories she told were true.

No worries about or for fallen gods or pantheons.

No fears or or about Perpetua, who had fallen after a terrible rampage across the stars, from what little was told to the people on Earth. Just herself, Raven, and Death, sweet, lovely, haunted Death who let herself be around them.

Time blurred into that sequence of interwoven pleasure until each of the women was asleep in the arms of the other, resting in a much deeper and more content sense, leaving the worries of tomorrow for the day thereof.

TITANS TOWER GUEST ROOM, MONDAY: 

Yeneli had reforged the room further, into the image of the Muspelheim she knew, which was not akin to that of the one in this era, and in this time. Scrying-fire was a thing known to them, but it was just that. A fire kindled from branches, and woven in with the magic of one of the primordial spheres. Hers had used pools of magma, a thing of her own creation, and this she had built, after constructing a small circular hemisphere of stone to hold the magma. In the pool of flames she watched. She could see the Aesir, for where Odin's Galdr was proof against the cunning of Jotnar-magick even of their realm in this aeon hers was ancient, and it knew thing that the magick of this world did not.

She saw the Aesir and the Vanir working together, taking the last steps. Today was Moon's Day, tomorrow would be Tyr's Day, then Odin would come on Woden's Day, he would launch his forces to seize the chance to defy fate, before the thing from _Beyond_ and its dread kin the Unmaker departed and took with them the chance that awaited. Odin had to, it was his quest, his forever futile quest, and yet here, in this time, it was not futile. More than most she knew how much a lack of futility could be curse as well as blessing. It was not really her fight, she had a vendetta against the thing that had tried to bind her, that had managed to cut her, and was seeking to wield her as a weapon. A struggle against one of _them_ , the Deathless, the New Lords for whom the Stars Were Right. And against the demoness, whose life endured so long as the abomination in the self-proclaimed Empire of Azarath still had her gauntleted hands seeking to grasp her love.

Her hand clenched on the hilt of the sword.

She would not be rejected, she would not.

She had not clawed her way out of the imprisonment she'd been stuck in in that timeless dream thanks to the unwitting aid of the monster from the Deathless race to be rejected. The demoness had done this with her binding, and before, Desire had manipulated her, Desire had made Death stand in front of it, because nothing could have loved that monster, not even its kin. Did not Dream of the Endless prove this? Desire and a demoness, one at that whose powers, insofar as her scrying showed, were very powerful. The demoness could instill love as an emotion where there was none, just as Desire could.

Her hand clenched about the hilt of the blade. A night and a day and then the Aesir.

And then, then the confrontation with it, the thing that lurked and snarled and desired the overthrow of her love.

Only then would her blade sink itself once more in the heart of someone who her love 'loved' and in that, she would be grateful. Her enslaver dead, and then, a long-awaited reckoning with Desire of the Endless.

TITANS TOWER, MONDAY:

"Well, now we have another monster in the basement, so to speak,"

It was Conner who said this, as the rest of the team pondered. 

"Yeah, I saw how Death looked at her. She literally said that she tried to murder her."

Their eyes turned to Raven and then to Donna. Donna's in turn went to Raven, who sighed.

Yeah.....that attempt to murder her was a thing Death told me about.She did try to kill her, and did kill Despair of the Endless. 

The team was silent for a while. It was Gar who made a low whistle.

"So we don't just have a monster in our basement, we have a monster that literally killed the entire concept of Despair."

They nodded. Gar continued "Man Dementors would hate her so fucking much."

Death strode in at that point and the team was silent, looking at her awkwardly. She pinched her nose while resting her weight on her umbrella, which she didn't really need to do in some ways and yet in other ways....her head ached with that same splitting headache she'd had the other day and she needed it to be able to see more than to balance things, at points, and at others she saw with clarity on the small and the large scales to match that of Destiny.

She'd fainted yesterday and now her head hurt that much more, and it lasted through a day where the team talked, went for a multi-hour training exercise blending physical things with sparring (and Death herself had sparred Starfire and Troia in her 'normal' form and proven far more than their equal, to a point that Donna Troy realized then that trying to fight the concept of life and death was an exercise in futility and understood much more why the Morningstar and Demiurgos had gone to Jump City recently and what all that meant). The day blurred into coping with the pain and trying to keep her vision steady and not fading into an endless whiteness and white sphere.

Then that evening, her love emerged from the guest room and her eyes, as with Raven and Starfire's tracked the white streak and their bug-eyed reaction drew the gaze of the other Titans. Death looked in a mirror and found her gaze wider, as it wasn't just her hair, now. Her hair was half-white and half black, but her clothes, the sign of who she was and what she was.....they had become a very light shade of grey. She began to tremble, as the mirror briefly changed to show a realm of ivory and gold, and a bloated titan on a great gilded throne whose eyes shone with the light of murdered stars.

A dual-voiced laugh echoed from the mirror, a sound heard not just by Death, or Raven, but by everyone in the Tower, and then in Jump City where it carried itself on the wind and became the wind. The creature smiled and then leaned forward on her throne.

**_The one-eyed king shall try to claim his due from fate, but fate for him is not to be denied. He has awoken greater powers to preserve it. And yet, in the end, his quest shall fail from himself but it shall succeed with mine. Enjoy the last days of being able to take the souls of the dead, Mors. You shall become Life everlasting, and no longer shall you and your family know the grief that is the separation of the Endless, and your departure from your realm._ **

**_Your soul and your blood are all that I must gather, and then the Rite shall begin. Your sister gave me the keys to my power, Mors. When you are Vita, you shall thank me and then dear Mania shall know that she brought Delight to one who has so sorely lacked it._ **

The thing stood up on her throne and raised her hands and her twin voices echoed in thunder: Mine the hands that heal, mine the hands that still the wings of Death!

And then in a flash of light that left a horrid odor the thing vanished.

RAVEN'S BEDROOM, MONDAY EVENING:

Death clung to Raven that night, begging her at the beginning for her to take her favorite toy and use it with supreme strength and ruthlessness. She felt more like herself when it was there, and having to deal with the fear of what the changes meant, could mean, would mean.....Death had not waited long when sundown came, she'd pulled Raven there with a strength that had amazed Raven, even awed her slightly. Death seldom asserted what it was to be one of the Endless, nor did she remind Raven that in grasping an Endless in the binding she'd placed on her that she'd grasped not merely a tiger by the tail but a being perfectly capable even within the bind she'd placed of easily outmatching anything she could have done.

The degree to which even taking the full element of Pride to try to slow Death down had failed, Death's grip intensifying, her door opening merely to a wave of her hand and then closing, that was likewise humbling. Still further when Death snapped her fingers and the doors shut and they were unclad. She'd growled those words then, and meekly, Raven/Pride/the blend of them both awakened and amazed and more than either, terrified, hastily moved to comply, an unspoken spell grasping it in black energy and tying it around her. It was amazingly easy even for her, who knew far better than most, to forget who Death was and what she was, when Death so often acted like a woman who shared her issues and her fears of just...existing...in a world which meant her original purpose was obsolete and so was everything she knew and then what?

The being that had given her the orders clung to her, riding her, moving with a speed that she knew only the Speed Force could exceed, given circumstances, and 'circumstances' were most damned unlikely.

It humbled her, both Rachel Roth and Pride and the Raven that was the blend of them both, the recognition that at any point if her lover had wished she could have taken her circumstances, the fetters she'd sought to build, and shattered most of them save the elements within the command feather any time she'd wished. The command feather specified that the Titans were to be preserved from her gift until they had lived lives long enough to suit them, in its simplest spell, and it bound Death's hand here to Raven and to Starfire making sure that the terms suited the other Titans. Past that, none of the rest of this was actually there.

She had not tied Death to her sexually, and as Death moved with that swiftness that overwhelmed her, it was something that the part of her that was human and demon alike came to enjoy that much more, as something that had troubled her surged into and then past awareness. She knew all too well from her mother's nightmares in Azarath and from the stories and the harsh words of her mentors in that dimension the circumstances of her birth. The thought that she'd become her father and ensnared Death like this had soured things more than slightly and yet here, Death rode her and clung to her and moved and it was Death that not only initiated things but overrode anything and everything she could have done to try to slow things down.

Death was on top, her hands moved with a speed and a strength that Raven and even Pride couldn't see. Reality seemed heavier, colder....darker. Darker than even she had enjoyed in the old days when she had thought her world would end in fire on her sixteenth birthday. Her shadows and fangs and eyes gleamed and yet before Death's gaze they seemed to merge in with the backdrop in a way that left her disoriented and understanding just what Kori must have felt when they were with her, and for her, and caught up in Death's pleasures as their emotions rippled into and mirrored each other in a roiling maelstrom that crashed into the mental defenses of the being that was daughter to Angela Roth and Trigon the Terrible with inexorable and irresistible force.

Raven twitched and stared into space, her mind overwhelmed and her body caught up in things, enjoying the elements of cutting loose along with her powers unconstrained by any other force that she had at her disposal, and some element with her and within her twin natures sought to try to get something of her own and yet the Endless's sheer weight as a being overpowered that, left her constrained and utterly and wholly in the power of another, her orgasms coming in a most literal sense in a continual set of spasms that finally left her in a semi-conscious haze on her bed, breath rasping slightly in a manner just slightly higher than her speaking voice.

Death curled up at her side, in a much closer and more intimate sense than usual, and Raven gently and exhaustedly reached to hold her. Death rested, even seemed to sleep insofar as the concept of Death could sleep, in a sense of relief and quiet happiness. Raven, remembering the thing that had laughed with a laughter that had echoed from the tower and seemed to seep into the winds of Jump City, did not sleep a wink. The same entity that had casually shown her a small, very small, taste of her true power and prowess was facing an entity powerful enough on paper, if nothing else, to quite literally rewrite that entire concept.

A being confident enough, what's more, to telegraph her hand in the confidence that there was nothing that could be done to stop her.

And then, toward the small hours of the morning as Death remained in a silent slumber, Raven's eyes turned to the Command feather and then to the thought of the blade in that scabbard, and a small light bulb formed over her face, as her eyes closed and she took a brief cat-nap, and awoke surprisingly refreshed for a mere one and a half hours of sleep. She had an idea, and she would need to risk talking to an entity that telegraphed the full intent to murder her to pull it off, but maybe....

REALM OF DESTINY OF THE ENDLESS:

Destiny turned the pages of his book, his eyeless face passive, though his heart was firm with misgivings. He alone among entities, who was freed of the burdens of his Book as it had worked in the past, was enjoying his freedom, and pre-emptively mourning its brevity. But he knew more than most where things would end from all of this, how the fallout would further shake a family that had already been shaken heavily as it was.

And he knew, though he did not relish the thought, that some things, called from the grave, were more easily called from it than returned, and that even the strutting aspiring lords of all that would ever be who had the power to become so, or the closest things to such in that vast expanse that he knew with further ill-ease that his sister had known of and understood instinctively where he did not.

The deep waters had risen and now the wave crested to the sea.


	12. All Hail the God on the Gilded Throne

ZANDIA, THE BALTIC: 

The Unmaker stood on the shore of Estonia in the form of a Black woman clad in silver with two sunfire eyes. Her skin was dark, dark as human skin could get, the suns turned to the golden palace that had bloated from Zandia and reached outward. Northern Europe was fearful but with the evident return of the multiversal horror that had attacked their world years ago, the superheroes were distracted. 

Desperation gave Russia a chance to flex itself, its powers exerted outward and its nuclear might prepped with the kind of weapon that could crack a continent. If the Russians were a little smug at being able to do this near one of the countries it still blamed for the end of the USSR, that was carefully kept quiet. The short range missile struck as a lance of fire and an artificial sun of a sort detonated in the interior of the budding Azarathi citadel.

It was a brilliant flash of light that flickered and then the citadel seemed to reflect the infinite hunger that had spawned it as the nuclear blast was literally devoured. 

The Unmaker clicked her teeth.

 _ **Well, they tried.  
  
**_ She was no longer human in form, now, but a Titan of equal size to the one now on its second attempt to devour this multiverse. Two suns became a constellation of nine and the world held its breath as her right hand formed a sphere of interwoven lightning and smoke. The Unmaker-force surged outward and reality _ripped, physics bleeding_ where that power surged out, chunks torn from it and enduring. And yet in the singular stroke the citadel had been unmade. For a moment she smiled and then the grin vanished when a boomtube opened behind her and disgorged three New Gods. Barda and Scott Free and Orion, the hound of war.

Her face was passive as she turned to confront the heroes of New Genesis. 

TITANS TOWER: 

Yeneli’s gaze was curious in spite of herself. 

_**My sword and your spell against the deathless witch’s incantation? You think this will work?** _

To her visible irritation Raven had Death hanging onto her, clingy. It was, she knew, an unsubtle gesture and the little demoness didn’t even have the fuller picture. She smelled what they had done last night, even on the alien. It enraged her but it was what it was.   
  
The demoness spoke on but Yeneli ignored her words, seeing only Death’s hand intertwined with hers. Death asked questions, important ones, but all Yeneli chose to see was the work of the spell. Eventually she stormed off to the Titans Tower training room which was given a very sore trial from her even if she made a point to keep her blade within its scabbard. She lost track of time, the League arriving and discussing plans with her exorcising her rage on an obstacle course that burned and became molten.   
  


A tectonic rumble caught her attention and she saw him, the king of their world, as he was now. Training and courtly culture led her to kneel, a sense of sudden aching loneliness striking as the full truth of Death’s words hit home. She felt mortal shame that before her uncle, king of all the World-Destroyers that she wept then but the tears did not stop.

GOTHAM: 

Gotham was less overtly menacing by day but only relatively so. Superpowered and supervillainous activity never ceased of its own will, only the arrival of Delirium had broken that spell, mostly. A new opportunist had arrived in daylight hours in the deathless world that had seen its return. He had taken to worship of the Second of the Seven with her Stygian eyes of malice. 

He attributed to his worship the return of death and had given himself the name Doctor Death. The fire-giant had made his job easier. Death had come with blazing eyes and a sword of terror. Fear followed. And....the other rogues were absent.

His minions were active and unknown to him shadowed by the Batgirl as the Batman had returned. Returned, taken an athame and other elements. He had enough familiarity with the Necronomicon to recognize the same dual voice Raven had heard. While the rest of the team went to Titans tower he was here once more, working to preserve Gotham.   
  
The Jotunn had carved a terrible path. Next would be it, the thing that had attacked their world and the other fifty one worlds. Next to that Doctor Death and his misguided cult were as nothing.

When she descended on Gotham it was the impact of a meteor of green, dead starlight trailing in a strange arc with her. Gotham shuddered beneath the impact and then it had raised its head and bellowed that primordial foghorn howl. That and the rain of birds and insects was expected. The sudden eruption of golden-ivory energy that ripped and rippled outward. It was the viral effect, the infinite hunger of the Azar and her Undying Flame facing fertile kindling.   
  
A city of darkness that slaked the maw of the grave began to encounter the deathless majesty of the virus-entity and the first infectees howled in misery. They understood what was done to them. That they were no longer themselves but part of the same entity that strode through Gotham laughing in dual voiced laughter with a mad tinge. Through the heart of insular Gotham she strode, and the deathless virus with her. 

Doctor Death himself stood before her, clad in a tuxedo with a red cape. Though he did not know it, his stand would buy the Batman just enough time to set up his attempt to confront the monster. 

Doctor Death knew nothing of Gods or monsters, but could only partially process what he saw. He saw a thing whose presence was like flaying knives coated in salt and acid. The Titan that strode toward him was vaguely humanoid in shape. Her face was flared like a dish, a prominent sagittal crest flaring from her head like a crown.

Her eyes were dead stars, the being Titano sized against him, a man of woman born and yet a favorite of Death herself. He raised a weapon from his Intergang days, a firearm from the foundries of Darkseid himself.   
  
With a triumphant shout he fired a God’s gun at the colossus with dead starlight blazing from her eyes. The recoil nearly knocked him flat and the beam-bullet lanced out to collide with the crudely stylized two headed dragon on her breastplate. An eerie howl followed and the Titan vanished into a flash of light. The light faded and the thing’s mouth became that of an eerie grin. She looked down at him. He neither saw nor felt the motion of her left arm that left him an exploded mess but by then the Batman had arrived.   
  
He held an athame in his right hand and he shouted a name. “Zezhelanzunui!” 

The Azar turned to him, left hand covered in what was once Doctor Death.   
  
The Batman began an incantation of the sort he’d read in the Necronomicon. 

“Per Adonai Elohim Adonai Jehovah! In Almousin Metatron! Yog-Sothoth mehsh’l naszrakh!” 

A bolt of energy lanced out as he repeated the name at the start of the incantation and that of Yog-Sothoth twice more. Again a blast of dreadful potency struck the great Azar, who anchored herself in turn. The blast summoned more power but when it faded, he looked upon a two-headed dragon in dark green armor. The virus had not been contained or reversed, if anything it was intensified. 

_**I wield a multiverse as a man does a marble. You are an orphan in a fur-suit. There is no power a mere mortal may wield against me. I am greater than Gods and will endure beyond the Endless. You are nothing, last son of a dead lineage.** _

_**Now.....last son of a dead lineage, I shall be kind to you as your friend the Kryptonian is and let you live.** _   
  


He woke up unknown to him two hours later with every bone in his body sore, and others broken. Cassandra was flying the plane as Tim looked over his wounds. The Batwing was over the central USA now with a few hours to go. Behind them the Deathless plague continued to spiral outward, its architect since departed from Gotham to the first Lazarus Pit. 

TITANS TOWER: 

_**Uncle Surtr?**_  
  
Yeneli stared in shock. It was him but it was not him. He was thinner, more fire than magma. Yet it still was a version of her uncle. 

**Hail and well met. You are my niece but you are not her.  
  
** Facing her Uncle it was easy to miss the humans that had arrived with him. Most of them. Not the woman in the one piece and its curious colors. Alone in existence she had taken the Godkiller in her heart and lived to tell the tale. Her heart twinged and her gaze became one of fear and wrath toward Diana, who simply snorted and moved on. 

_**You are here with her?** _

Surtr scoffed. **Odin is coming, my niece. The Wild Hunt shall ride. Them from the Outside have weakened the weave of fate. The Gore god thinks he can alter fate. Unfortunately the reality is that he can. The First of the Seven has his sphere askew.  
**

Surtr grinned. **So we are here to set things to rights. For a change I work with these heroes instead of against them.  
**

Yeneli blinked. Then an expression old and forgotten crossed her face. Delight, interwoven with battle-lust.

 _ **To ride against Asgard before facing a scion of the Kelzhandar Oath. If you would have me join them, Uncle, I would relish it.**_ From her scabbard she drew her blade. _**This has not drawn the blood of any in the nine save the sons of Midgard. I welcome that it will face them unbound.  
**_

Then the Batman arrived accompanied by the Batgirl. Their eyes followed first him then to the television screen that showed the riotous element of ivory and gold and the howling denizens of Gotham in its path.   
  
From two thousand lips echoed the phrase “All hail the God on the Gilded Throne! Azarath! Azarath! Azarath! Zezhelanzunui i-nishi-Azarath!” 

FIRST LAZARUS PIT: 

The God of the Gilded Throne stood, her feet anchored and her presence mauled by the spiderwebbing ivory and gold. The place hummed in fear, recognizing a superior force. Her lips marked in a sneer with her sharp teeth visible. Her hunger was at work. The traces of its devouring set their teeth in and she cared not. Drool slid down her right cheek and smashed into the ground with an eerie hiss.   
  
She turned her gaze to the Pit. 

_**From Death there is life everlasting amidst the will of the spheres of all her kindred.  
**_  
She lowered a vial into the Pit, taking of its waters, then placed a stopper upon it. Then, her gaze paused as the sickly light of murdered stars gleamed, she became prostrate by it and drank deeply of the Pit, taking a pleasure in it akin to the opium smoker or the heroin user with their needle. 

Levitating herself to her feet, she licked her teeth. 

_**Not the Fountain but it does have a kick to it.  
** _

She grinned at a different level and then her right hand clenched as a blade formed from thin air, adorned with runes. He was coming, the son of Uxas of Apokolips. Not here, nor in Gotham. Megiddo, in the land of Eretz Yisrael. There she would humble the force that laid her low. It was time the Gods knew a power greater than theirs and undiminished. Sword in hand she flew and the impact of her erupting from the ground was tectonic, seismographs worldwide noting her presence. Like a streak of green and blue she moved, trailing the light of dead stars.

She landed in the Valley of Megiddo and in the midst of the dust cloud and the crunching impact of her boots ivory and gold extended outward.   
  
Her gaze craned upward and then in a brilliant flash of light a Boom Tube brought a confused and angry and relieved Kalibak to an Earth. His gaze caught the taller and malevolent entity whose eyes burned with the light of dead suns and he spoke a singular word in a voice for once the mirror of his father’s.

**You.**

UPPSALA, SWEDEN, MIDNIGHT: 

The one eyed King rose and sat astride his horse Sleipnir, eight legged son of Loki.   
  


It was the witching hour, the perfect time for one of the great gods of magick to begin his greatest and last shot. A vast throng was behind him, with chariots led by goat or cat or horse. Odin raised his horn and a long and terrible blast sounded, a mirror to the sound that had smote Gotham. The Wild Hunt rose and as one moved, its clamor seeing the wise flee and the foolish devoured.   
  
To the West they rode, Odin, Freyja, Tyr, Thor, and the Valkyrie whose steeds of red eyed slavering wolves howled with anticipation. West they rode, to destiny’s script and the red dawn, the smell of the battlefield dead in their train. 


	13. All are one in the Azar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Black Alice goes to Gotham to try to repair the damage of the new Golden Rift by a gamble that she is not certain will or can work. 
> 
> The Wild Hunt confronts the Titans, League, and the Jotnar. 
> 
> A cosmic virus confronts a son of Darkseid.

GOTHAM CITY, THE GOLDEN RIFT:

In later years the memory of the incident would see it called the Golden Rift, for it was a simpler thing to say and to have said those things than to grasp the nature of what had truly occurred. Where a monster had strode through the great city there was a strange and fluid mixture of ivory and gold that had begun to reach out and to warp the humans that had not had the sense to run. Their voices changed and echoed with a dual-voiced timbre and there was a low and haunting chanting that seemed like and yet unlike the rolling winds that themselves were changing. Darkness was Gotham's natural habitat, even the daytime was grayer and yet there was a brilliant, though dead and sterile, light that shone with an eldritch nature.

It was powerful, this light, and dreadfully familiar. She remembered it, the image of the giant thing that had fallen from the sky in their world and the union of the fifty-one worlds facing it, the giant taking the full might of the Source and losing a hand and then what had come after. Then they had let the greatest and the strongest fight but here....she mused. She had felt it ever since the thing had come in. There had been a fight, against one of the minor supervillains in Metropolis, and she had felt something respond to her push and it felt more like an infection than the truth.

It was not a pleasant sensation and it had intensified after a strange moment. Now she was struggling to hold it back, but it offered something of great risk but also great potential. She would call upon the monster's power to banish its infection, in her, and in the broader world.

As she raised her hand she sought to dismiss the illusion that for a moment she had become taller, and knew that there was the distortion in her voice. There was her voice, a fairly soft alto, and there was a lower and sultry voice that had an undertone of very archaic languages, the harsh tones of Latin and of all tongues, Hebrew. And there was that _other_ voice that boomed like a thunderclap as a true voice worthy of a God.

The Rift had called her, at one level, and she was more than aware of it but she was Black Alice. She had commanded enormous powers before, even those of the Spectre, and survived it. Her face became determined as she sought to do this too, speaking in a resonant triple-voiced harmony in an alien tongue that she did not fully grasp and the golden rift seemed to pause, as if it knew its master.

Her eyes shone with triumph and then the rift erupted outward in a howling primordial foghorn and she found herself hurled upward into the sky, improbably awed at her flight, and the motion of that hurling led to her falling on the outermost of the Canary Islands, shaking her head and coughing from the dust.

It had failed, she realized with a face dulled with the pain of the failure, and the infection in her was expanding. Her hands were larger and at times they seemed vaguely human but now she looked and she saw not human hands but ones with green scales and wicked-looking sharp claws. She reached out and saw with horror that the claw could and did tear into the soil, leaving an ivory and gold streak following it. Her jaws ached as they stretched into a muzzle and she saw a spectral head at her shoulder and then her field of vision enhanced in scale and in sight with senses she had not imagined.

Was this what it was like to be Superman or Supergirl? To see atoms in distant planets and the infinity of space, the goodness and the malice of the human heart? Her motions had increased in swiftness and so did her perceptions. Fly-wings beat slowly and the Green Lanterns were not awe-inspiring forces of good but beings with great and even respectable power but more a target than a threat. She shook her head, attempting to speak but a guttural language that was of no human origin nor any known world rasped out, syllables smiting the air in raw force.

Again she struggled but there was a mocking laughter that rasped in the wind and she heard it moving from a stuttering whisper to peals of thunder, her clawed hands reaching out and ripping more ivory and gold into the island, and then she heard a voice speaking in dual harmonies, one soft and regretful and the other mocking and triumphant:

_**Mine the hands that kill,** _

_**mine the hands that heal,** _

_**mine the hands that still the wine-dark sea.** _

_**Mine the hands that set the stars to burn,** _

_**that found the world of ash and remade it as ivory and gold.** _

She looked into the waters, seeing in them something horrid, a reflection that was no longer her, but a face vaguely humanoid. Blonde, with eyes that glowed with the light of dead stars, face bulging outward like a dish with a prominent sagittal crest rising over the rest, fangs gleaming in that face as other eyes briefly surged into a brilliant light.

The last traces of Black Alice, who had fought a long and lonely battle against the viral power of the Azar unleashed in fullness, betrayed in the end by a force of the Seven Endless that would not have known of her nor cared and in truth only damned because of that, because the virus when unleashed no longer had a will to restrain its worst traits, led the monster to grasp its head and scream in terror in a sound that transformed and became the primordial foghorn-bellow of the Azar's war-cry, a sound that brought corpses of sea life rising from the oceanic depths and the fall of birds from the skies.

From that sound's ending there came a new dual laughter, both voices echoing in a mad stuttering that marked the rise of a force that would not allow the boon of death but instead a world where God sat tangibly on a gilded throne and all existence knew a new mistress that would leave it longing for death and regretting, in the end, that the destruction of its old friend and creator had lost it something that would never, ever return.

The clawed hands were now gauntlets which flared outward, as did her boots, the gauntlets bejweled with each finger and each thumb having a ring, seven adorned with jewels, and one band of gold, silver, and platinum, respectively. The newly transformed beneficiary of the virus looked at her reflection again, her smile now something predatory and deranged, one of the gleaming stars in her face twinkling with flares of light that drew steam from the water.

 _ **All are one in the Azar,** _she snarled, and then her form, gigantic and monstrous, rose from the shore marked with the gilded streaks.

She could fly fast now, faster than anything save that which tapped into the Speed Force and using it to escape her would burn out a body's ability to wield it past a point, such that it would merely be a matter of time. Reality itself opened to her and she saw its vastness and knew the inexorable hunger and the desire to eradicate that most detestable of things, a universe that did not know the blessed Chaos of the eternity she held within her vast gauntlets. She could see the world in the oceanic depths where the proud sons and daughters of Atlantis were even now working to restrain her. She saw the green light arcing from space as the children empowered by the Guardians of the Universe unleashed the full powers of their Ring.

They would buy this world time and the creature simply smiled, in a cold and arrogant grin.

There had been one of them on this world. Thanks to the hubris of a mortal who had sought to contain a power far beyond them, something that perhaps only Uxas or Izaya could have dared to try, now there were two. More time and more space to expand the virus, not just in this world, she mused.....but in others as well, if she wished. But she did not. The hunger that animated her was raw and primordial, a force of Chaos unbound and welcoming its firstborn to provide its power and its nature after so long of Urhalzan and Pandaemonium suppressing it.

Yet more powerful than it was a streak of sadism and cruelty, a giant who grasped a mortal and squeezed slowly aching to see the results that followed, to see it, to feel it, to...smell it. The very air rasped when she moved and she felt that and that sense of power, the portion of her that had once been human weeping in despair as the newly enhanced form could see the Earth turning and the infinity of space with keen sight at the very edge of the Wall in the Promethean Galaxy across all the fifty-one worlds. Her eyes narrowed, and a snarl formed. The infection within the Wall was gone, and there were _tears._ Her lucidity had been correct. The Unmaker had followed her here.

No matter, she would draw her out with a set of atrocities and ensure that she would not stop the new slaking of the hunger, and the transformation of the world not by the infection of a Gem but of one of the very Seven forces that upheld it. Her hair was turning white now, and she, the Endless that she was, was blind to the idea that such an entity as she, ancient beyond universes, could be targeted by it. To transform Death into the keystone had its merits. Not least the delightful irony that the very foundation of both concepts would become that point. All the ritual would do woul-

She paused.

Her lucid self had seen it but ignored it, thinking that the demoness had not known what it was that she possessed. The true-sight that was of her natural being looked at the Tower and saw something in the daughter of the Angra Mainyu's room. A feather, adorned with powerful runes, the kind of thing that could and would threaten her plans and she growled, in a low and menacing sound. Up to this point the greater scheme had been in effect. Now......

Her eyes turned to where a great battle's effects still raged on. Now she would capture another demoness and prevent that which she had set in motion when lucid from having its most obvious weakness take shape.

TITANS TOWER:

The Wild Hunt had ridden from Uppsala at midnight, the Witching Hour, and that blend of elements and of influence had meant that Raven and Zatanna woke up the teams. Only Death had not slept, even as her hair displayed the strange dual-hue, and her motions were a blend of stiff and for a reason that neither Zatanna nor Raven fully placed, fear. The Jotnar had not slept either and they noticed with a wary look shared between the Endless and the two sorceresses that the King took especial care not to show his back to his niece. When she saw them, her smile aimed at Death was sweet with a kind of softness that none had quite seen from her but it soured the instant her eyes lit on Raven and had vanished by the time the teams moved to the outskirts of the island.

Months ago the twin sons of Yahweh had fought Odin and they had been given a stark fight. That thought was in the minds of everyone on the island except the younger-seeming Jotunn, whose stoic face hid a blend of battle-lust and eagerness, her hand on the hilt of her blade, her other hand flexing around the scabbard, her impression that of a volcano on the edge of eruption. A heat exuded from her that withered and wilted plants on Titans Island, and created a steam-cloud that served as an extra to the fog that crept in in the dead of night, as the horn of the Wild Hunt and the terrible sound of hoofbeats in the skies echoed.

Nine riders swept down from the sky.

At the lead was a figure with a great spear, one-eyed, his beard trailing down to his chin. Usually Odin went clean-shaven but in this face and in this fashion he had called upon the older face of his known to his past worshipers, for it was in this face as Wotan that his Wild Hunt had endured when the old ways had been suppressed. To the left was a figure on a great steed with a gaunt face and a smile to match and even to rival that of the Joker, carrying a sword that shone with the power and the skill of Nidavellir. To the right was a burly figure moving in a chariot propelled by goats, a vast and towering ginger-haired brute, with a hammer belted at his side and a belt that magnified his strength further. His eyes shone like the lightning that was his gift and his power echoed with the strength of Earth that was his mother.

Above Odin rode in a chariot pulled by vast lions the size of the greatest of living bears Freyja, whose face shone with a brilliant beauty, amplified by the necklace around her neck and by the spear at her own side. Odin was frenzy and he was death, he was battle and he was lord of the gallows. Freyja was beauty and she was splendor and she had an earthy element of desire with her as was the gift of Vanaheim, and yet she was no less menacing than he and there was an aura of expectation in her face.

Behind them rode the one-handed god of war and of war's arbitration, Tyr, whose sword was belted at his side. His was a face redolent in both blood and slaughter and in the gorier frenzies of war. More aristocratically beautiful than Ares, yet no less menacing a foe.

And behind all of them on wolves rode women with eyes that gleamed with skeletal and sepulchral menace, their steeds' eyes blazing with balefire-lights, their motions powerful and wondrous things. Their aura flavored the air with the stench of blood and entrails and carrion more than Odin's, for they were the Valkyries, whose presence was that of Odin's bodyguard and those who went with him to carry those of the honored dead not chosen for Folkvangr to Valhalla.

Before them stood two teams of fourteen people, each with a Kryptonian who flew over the others, eyes blazing with a reddish fire hue. Each had speedsters who were poised to call upon themselves the Speed Force, each a shapeshifter in green, one roaring in the form of a Mapusaurus and the other hovering like the Kryptonians with suns gleaming in his own eyes. Each had a sorceress, one of whom stood with her hands sparking with wards, the other of whom hung back protectively near a woman clad in black with a silver ankh and hair that had turned half-white and the other half still dark as night, her eyes retaining that darkness and that warmth and understanding in them.

Each, too, had an Amazon who stood side by side, each drawing out sword and shield, the weaponry of Hephaestus against that of Wayland.

The men of Gotham stood together too, uncertain as to what courses they should take. The Batman wore one of his suits of armor warded against entities of divine nature, with a complete lack of certainty as to how well it would work. Robin likewise wore one, one of many that Bruce Wayne had quietly commissioned for his children, refusing to leave any of them unprotected.

The daughter of Tamaran and the son of Atlantis were together as well, the Atlantean holding the trident that made the Ocean hum with its power, his strength coiled in tension. The daughter of Tamaran trained by the Okaarans made a quiet oath to bloody-handed X'Hal, the terrifying and all too real goddess of her people whose nature could and did set worlds afire.

Beyond them all and ahead of them were two beings that gave the Aesir a sense of foreboding. One of them, the male, was brooding and dour, and yet his face had a smile that did not reach his eyes, with gloating anticipation. Surtr, the Black King of the World-Destroyers.

Beside him was a woman, in her full form as a volcanic living fury, and it was her who drew her blade first and for a moment as Gungnir was hurled downward to mark the onset of hostilities, the Aesir froze. The blade drawn from that scabbard had slain one of the Endless, and yet it had not. That notion gave Odin pause until that power that was his from the mead of knowledge and that gained from the head of Mimir made it clear. This was the slayer of Despair of the Endless from the very beginning, now the only being in existence that had lived in the Dawn-time.

Fires rippled up her sword and its heat blazed as Gungnir struck the island with a terrifying booming sound like a meteor, the fire noting that the challenge was met, and the Aesir descended from the skies, the Kryptonians moving to face the Valkyries, the Amazonians clanging their swords against their shields, and Thor's hammer raised as lightning crackled and the smell of ozone pervaded the air. Odin's gaze turned directly to the daughter of Trigon. It was her that he would have to claim, and in this sense he nodded to Frejya, who began to incant as he hurled himself down from Sleipnir with a sword drawn and adorned with runes, the other Aesir colliding with the superhero teams in an apocalyptic flash.

Beyond all this, as Thor faced off against the two Jotnar, there was the sickly feeling that curdled at the edge of reality now as it had before. A feeling of eternity become torment, of a hunger that could never be appeased and of a being uncaged and run mad as it was in its truer nature. A feeling that emphasized that if he was to forestall Ragnarok, he had to move now.

With that he strode toward the sorceress, as Freyja's incantations underlaid a swiftness to the motion of the Aesir and just enough to deaden and slow the reflexes of the mortals. The Speed Force's lightning crackled but it did so slowly enough that when the peals of its thunder followed they too felt like molasses. The Aesir were no strangers to bloodshed but they had not come to slay these mortals, nor to take of them as sacrifices, and any who would or did fall here would come to hallowed places in honor of the courage it took to face gods directly on the battlefield.

The metal man, the Cyborg, was moving to face Tyr with the younger Amazon, the elder, Diana, gave a loud war cry in Themysciran and moved to face Thor, who laughed with a boisterous glee at the challenge and hurled his hammer forward and the lightning echoed out as Diana swooped beneath it. The Valkyries faced an onslaught of the other heroes and were more than their equals, the Speed Force wielders taken out by swift blows from the hafts of their spears amplified by Frejya's incantations. Odin smiled, to see the ease with which his work paid off.

These heroes were mighty but against the New Gods, even, they did not do well absent the mightiest at their head. Against him and his own allies and servants?

That confidence hit a much harder stop when the two Jotnar turned to face him and stepped before the demoness. Surtr's look was that of a condescending and contemptuous scorn, though Odin was prepared to face that prospect of and with him. It had taken a great deed of heroism worthy of new sagas sun in Folkvangr and Valhalla for Bragi and Loki and Magni and Modi to do this, but it would pay off. He could, he believed with assurance, checkmate the king of the World-Destroyers and give himself the chance. The problem was that other one with her sword that rippled with heat that was boiling steam from the ocean, giving the clash a muggier and tropical heat, her eyes flashing with fire and her snarls low and guttural.

 _ **What you seek is not yours to claim,**_ her voice boomed in a shout that echoed with the raw power and potency of the Jotnar, and especially of the World-Destroyers.

_**You shall not pass, ruler of Asgard.** _

Odin's smile was malicious. "I shall," he said, and then with a snap of his fingers a burst of mystical energy brought an unconscious figure beside him, her body suspended.

Surtr gasped. **Sinmara?**

Odin nodded. "The very same. You can fight me, King of Muspelheim, and the two of us waste time in a confrontation neither of us much want, or you can see me take my blade and kill your wife. Your decision."

Surtr snarled, then his snarl became a roar of rage and then he stood down.

**You're not as clever as you think, King of the Aesir. You might have stopped me, but she obeys no orders.**

With that Yeneli smiled and her blade was raised over her head in a point of salute as her people reckoned things. Odin's eyes bulged out as he saw the wound at her chest and realized what blade had caused it. She smiled coldly. 

_**Yes, King of the Aesir, I took the Godkiller in my heart and I live, as I lived from when I slew one of the Seven. I have a reckoning of my own with the demoness, a contest for the heart of she whom in my folly I did not see would protect her own siblings even with her own heart. Her power I respect as one who did the impossible, in a thing that could not be done and has. She has bound Death, and has made her vulnerable to It. To the Thing that lurks beyond the stars that called me out of the Dreaming.** _

Yeneli laughed. 

_**The fools these mortals be! The demoness gave the God on the Gilded Throne entry here, let the Azar return. My love's younger sister, I suspect, has been paying visits to parts of the world and unleashed the madness at the heart of the Golden Hunger. Madness does know its own. The sword in my hand is the mirror of my uncle's, and it has grown with age as have I.** _

She turned the blade to Sinmara, who remained asleep in a powerful spell, now on the ground. 

_**Let me show you a useful facet of that growth, Aesir-King.** _

In a sudden motion she moved the blade and slammed it down near Sinmara's head and the wards that held her in that deep slumber shattered and her eyes flashed open and within a short span of time had found herself by her husband's side, the grogginess passed. 

Her smile was vicious. 

_**Your allies might be greater in magic and raw power than these heroes-**_ her sword pointed to the fall of the League and the Titans, only the Amazonians, the Kryptonians, and the Martians left- _ **but now you're not facing any few heroes. You're facing men of steel with eyes of fire, women whose entire function is preventing things like this...and two of us. The children of the realm that made the stars and whose swords will burn existence at its end, leaving only ashes.**_

She laughed, triumphantly.

**_My uncle is lord of the World-Destroyer-Land, that which in mere shards produced the stars, jewels in the crown of the skies. He no longer has a reason to stand aside._ **

By then the Amazonians and the Kryptonians had been pushed in closer to the Muspel-Jotnar, Sinmara reliant on her raw potency as a native mystical force as Diana of Themyscira moved to her side.

"King of Asgard!" Her voice was austere and clear, and even Yeneli knew respect. If not for her love's blessing, all her power and all her nature as one who had slain one of the Endless would have seen her dead with a sword in her heart, unknown and unmourned save by one who remembered. The Godkiller shone in the light of her own blade, and the Aesir and the Vanir alike were respectful of its power.

"This is madness! You cannot overcome the dictates of fate! The circumstances that make this possible will correct now as they did so before. The monster from beyond the stars will be banished and then nothing will have changed. What is the point of this folly?"

Odin strode toward her, calling Gungnir into his hand, Freyja by his side.

"It is my own purpose and my own fate. I am to try to defy the course of fate. Ragnarok can be prevented."

His finger pointed toward not the Endless but the demoness.

"That one has built a weapon that can let me do it. So long as fate offer the chance, I regret, Diana daughter of the Olympians, that I must take it."

And with that his spear moved as Diana's bracelet blocked it and the Aesir and Vanadis moved against the Kryptonians and the jotnar, in a clash so fast that only Raven and Death could chart the course at all. Against Gods, the full might of Clark Kent of Kansas was unleashed. He easily withstood the Valkyrie, knocking their steeds unconscious and wielding their attempts to rush him together against them, Kon-El joining him from above and the two progressively making swift work of them when no longer required to try to make sure the other heroes were alive, or at least unharmed.

Donna Troy clashed with Loki, as did Zatanna Zatara, a witch's duel that brought eldritch energies that were stalemated. What Loki conjured Donna's sword, the kin-sword to the Godkiller, and like it a product of the forge of Hephaestus, could slash asunder. What Zatanna conjured Loki could and did dispel with a thought, or by creating his own conjuration to devour and cancel out its effects. The magical energy was potent, Raven's nose trickling blood from the cumulative impact. She felt the decay that had onset in Black Alice reaching its peak in the Canaries and whispered a low and desperate "no" and then they all felt it, the Gods and the Amazonians and even the Endless.

The cosmic virus that had sought to set its tendrils more deeply into the Earth, a thing that had brought the cumulative power of all the world's mages to restrain its power as well as the weight of not one but many Green Lanterns, each focusing in shifts and ultimately to be augmented by power from Mogo and even the Guardians themselves, had at last overwhelmed one of the more powerful superhumans of the Earth and she had gained access to a raw and untrammeled power that was erupting in a progressively more virulent form.

The Aesir paused, the sword of Yeneli and Gungnir locked in a blade-lock as a sudden streak of dark green trailing dead starlight from her eyes swooped down with that primordial foghorn-roar as her battle-cry. It was swift, very swift, and for the first time since her summoning Yeneli caught a truer look at what had been audacious enough to summon her. It landed with an impact that dislodged the combatants and buried some of the unconscious heroes in rubble and dust, cracking windows of Titans Tower, and producing ripples in the Bay.

From the smoke rose a brutally rugged giant with a crudely feminine face bar the vast sagittal crest, her fanged smile a leer of malice and glee.

That which had been Black Alice turned to Raven, daughter of Trigon, and spoke:

_**My aberrant disciple, slayer of the Angra Mainyu....** _

Her voice crooned with a mocking softness. 

_**Now the one who has bound Death and won her heart, even if the little thing denies to herself that it is so. You have built a weapon. It has drawn him here, him and his bloodthirsty legions of barbarians. I would have that weapon, or failing it, you.** _

It was Pride, daughter of Trigon who surged to the forefront as Raven rose to the same height as the monster, her skin red as blood and her eyes glowing with four points of brilliant golden light. The new Queen of the Malebolge spoke in a voice of thunder:

_Go to Hell!_

That which had been Black Alice laughed with malice, a peal of thunder to rival that of the Joker, if lower and more like an endless thunderstorm greater than that called by Mjolnir. 

_**Hell is only a word, little demoness, and you and your kindred are but the metaphysical afterbirth of mortal psyche. Every obsession with sexuality, with fear and loathing and the ideology of sin and death wrought into concepts which when unleashed give torment to those who believe they deserve it most and yet deserve it least. Hell is the word, little demoness, and I am one of the realities behind that word.** _

_Azarath Metrion Zinthos!_

A bolt of brilliant white light, the same kind that had unmade the demon Trigon and sent him to Death's embrace in this part of the multiverse slammed into the giant, whose body simply anchored itself. The light flowed around her and seemed to be drunk in by her armor as her smile became wider still.The power intensified and the world held its breath, but still she remained until metal flowed in her right hand and became a great warhammer with a haft far longer than a man is tall and a vast and menacing head worked with terrible runes. The hammer moved with a sudden apocalyptic sound that marked the impact of the head with the ground and the light that had collided into her faded. 

**_I am Azarath, demoness! The world of paradise where there is neither misery nor death nor violence nor pain, only the tangible collective in the name of the great Azar!_ **

With that the hammer suddenly lanced out straight for Raven's chest as Death too late grasped what was intended and tried to rush forward to the fight. The hammer collided with Pride's body with a sickening crunch and winded, with blood pouring from her mouth she fell. Death for her part then saw the hammer vanish and the right fist of the creature collide into her own skull with force sufficient to hurl her down, Death falling with a simple groan of pain. The creature turned to the Aesir and gave them a derisory salute, the Jotunness moving with a roar of anger.

_**Her skull is mine!** _

With that she hurled the blade that had slain Despair into the armor of the thing that turned to her, arms spread out, fists partially unclenched like claws. The burning blade pierced through the armor and then through the beast's back, but where she had expected a weakening of limbs or a groan of pain, the creature smiled, coldly and cruelly.

_**You are not the only one that cannot die, little Jotunn. Mine is the curse to long for her touch and be unable to have it, so the torment that I endure is what I shall inflict upon her.** _

With that she pulled away Yeneli's hand and drew the burning blade from her chest and her back, and with a further motion hurled both the edge of the blade and Yeneli into the ground with a sudden burst of strength, only a slight gritting of her teeth marking the pain of both actions. 

_**Fallen into madness and the Hunger might I be, but I am still scion of the Oath. No daughter of the Oath may be taken by Death till the end of the Cycle when the Unmaker's power at last grants me the peace I crave. You, Jotunn, are no Unmaker.** _

The creature's eyes were lit as dead stars and a waterfall of blood of silvery hue trailed down her body, dwindling to a trickle and then not just the flesh but the armor healing in a visceral fashion that had Yeneli, who had pulled her blade back out of the ground. With Death on the ground, trickling blood from her head, the monster turned back to Raven, stepping toward Death and then with a cruel smile deliberately raising her foot and stepping on Death's other, hitherto undamaged wing and a brutal crunch that drew winces from everyone else followed.

Trailing bits of Death's blood in her footsteps, she strode toward the unconscious Raven, blood drying on her chin and splattered down her body, and smiled and then snarled as she shrunk herself to a more human size.

**_You were the end of one world, you shall watch the beginning of another._ **

In a sudden flash of light that left a foul and acrid odor behind it, that which had been Black Alice and was now infected by the Cosmic Virus and remade vanished in a mocking laugh. First here, and now......

Now she would torment the being that loved Death by ensuring that even if she 'lost' that one could never find the one she loved again until the very end of all things, by which point torment of life everlasting would be beyond what she could bear.

VALLEY OF MEGIDDO:

The first avatar, that which had been sent to perform the greater task, stood in the Valley of Megiddo, her eyes turned with a cynical and contemptuous smile to Kalibak. She too felt the emergence of the next avatar but it was of no concern of hers. If the greater entity intended it to last, so would it be, if not, not.

The plan was still motion, what she remembered of it and what she cared to implement. Here, though. there was the joy of a fight.

 _ **You humbled me then, son of Uxas,**_ she spoke coldly. _**Humbled me in that world in that first fight where I was tethered and my form was weak enough that you could hurt me. Now, here, let us settle which of us is stronger and which weaker.**_

With that she lunged at him and Kalibak simply smiled, his vast face marked with a cold and savage grin. 

**I am as I have always been, strongest among the New Gods. In physical strength even my father, God of our world, is as nothing next to me!**

With that his fist collided straight into her breastplate and with a sudden bemused grunt the swiftness of her motion became a sudden and unexpected lurch to the ground. Kalibak's foot was planted on her breastplate as he sneered at her.

**I don't care what you are outside this universe, creature of madness. If you make yourself subject to this one's laws, even one so mighty as you is still bound.**

For a moment, a very brief moment, everything in him was what his father Uxas would have respected, and that father had arrived in a Boom Tube quietly, expecting to see his failure of a son humbled. Instead the virus that had taken Perpetua was on her back again. It snarled and hurled Kalibak backward but his son moved with a surprising grace. The thing raised herself to her feet and moved but Kalibak simply held out his arm and it collided with her and knocked her down again, squatting on top of her and then with a divine strength began to slam his fists into her face at a speed that even her own power could barely keep full track of, the impacts enough to keep Uxas quiet.

In recent times Kalibak had fought one he feared and though he'd failed had been the only one of his sons to fight the Khan. He had withstood the tortures of Granny Goodness and DeSaad on behalf of the Khan. Before that he had fought this same creature in another Earth and laid it low, and now here he was, in the valley which in one of humanity's many religions marked the end of time, laying low the monster in the shadow of Armageddon.

Darkseid's eyes turned quietly to his son. Perhaps he had underestimated Kalibak. His son was not the strongest nor the most clever, and he would never be more than a brute to keep his more powerful foes busy. Yet here, in a foe that was foolish enough to challenge him on his own ground, he faced the full power of a being that Darkseid's talks with Izaya and their consultation of the Source had revealed the deeper truths of who it was and what it was. Kalibak had humbled her again and yet, for all that, he was a being of fists against a horror that could and did appraise a multiverse in a way much like he did, but on a far grander scale.

The last punch moved toward a bloodied and cratered face and a gauntleted hand caught it, broken teeth spat from the creature, and then it moved with brutal force, grasping Kalibak and hurling him over her head and down with enough force, light and lightning flowing down her arms from her shoulders through her gauntlets to leave him unconscious.

Another Boom-Tube opened and Highfather strode out, and she turned.

_**More meat for the meat-grinder in this valley?** _

She waved her right hand in a derisory loop.

_**My ancestors were Jews who embraced the Roman ways, down to reversing their circumcision to fit into gymnasia. The House of Julia Domina were held to be sorcerers and apostates. So what this is to the Church is less than relevant to either, but it would make a satisfying irony. You, Izaya of New Genesis, destroyed one of my hands when I was weak, tethered to a mortal's soul, fettered by lucidity.** _

She snarled and then in a flash of light her human-like face was gone and a spectral head that mirrored the other was on her left shoulder, great wings extending from her back with vast bat-like shapes.Her flesh had become green, a Ceratopsid frill adorning her head marked with wicked serrated spikes that shone strangely in the Sun's light. 

**_Come then, sons of the Fourth World, let New God strive with New Lords of the Outer Spheres in fullness and see whom shall dictate to whom!_ **

FIRST LAZARUS PIT:

The newly consolidated Azar-avatar landed here, deciding to eschew the theatrics and simply bash a hole into the wards with her hammer. It had worked. She dropped Raven on the ground with another brutal crunch, quite deliberately angling the drop to shatter the demoness's nose for the fun of it. A rustling sound caught her ear and the transformed being's eyes began to move with a sudden dawning horror at just what kind of fabric made that ind of sound.

It had worked....and then she saw a being seated beside the pool clad in bright silver armor with a dark black ankh on her breastplate, hair dark as night and eyes that were nine glowing suns looking at her with a cold smile on her own face, the fanged teeth that marked their blood-heritage shining, the greenish hue of the pool contrasting against the silver.

 **Why hello, sister,** spoke the Unmaker. **I have been waiting for you.**


	14. Death, be not Proud

THE TIMELESS HALLS:

As she lay on the floor in Titans Tower, her broken wing sending sharp shards of pain into her very being that hurt much more deeply than her other wing that had been plucked in the past, Death's fingers clenched together as she remembered an encounter between universes.

She had gone then to the nexus of all things where the flautists and the drummers held in endless slumber that force which gnaws itself at the center of nuclear space, the boundless Daemon-Sultan Azathoth. The Dreamer who made all things (and part of her smiled, softly and sadly, at the memory of her younger brother in all his forms, once a figure of joy when she was of brooding sorrow and their mindsets would switch and never truly match). The Arkhalai had pointed her in that direction and she had seen her then, a being who had seemed horribly familiar, a skin to match her own in hue save that where hers was bone-white across the entirety of her body, the other's skin seemed almost marred by a Hel-like blend of bone and darkness that was true-black.

One of these markings along the forehead went between two of her nine eyes like a river, two main paths and smaller tributaries. One on her right jaw was part of a loop that curled from near her chin to just beneath her right ear. Her arms were marked with more river-like elements of darkness that clashed with the brilliant white hue of her flesh, as were what she could see of her legs. And then there was _it,_ the vast chasm of darkness that marked her flesh, half her neck unexposed and most of her torso blackened. The entity smiled, and her sunfire eyes shone more dreadfully in a brilliant sense that brought a sudden dawning wonder to Death.

_**The Lightdancer?** _

**No....**.the entity laughed, with a cold snarl. **She is but my projection. My Unmaker, fixing what designs my errant older brother and sister send awry. Sister Fate, Brother Shaper. Both faces of the Ten Thousand Formed Soul and Messenger. They the makers, I the Unmaker.**

She moved closer and pinned Death against the wall.

 **We share a name and a title and a function, little** **_girl_**....the last words were growled in a tectonic fury, the wall cracking slightly where the taller woman's fingers dug into the metal and the wood. **We share all of these. You are one of the Seven figures of a vast swathe of the multiverse, of which that associated with the entities some worlds call superheroes is but a small portion. Death the maiden, Death the cheerful girl. A child, forever and a day, in spite of being a being that is one of the few beings nearly as ancient as we are.**

Her breath was cold and Death could not resist shivering or a sense of fear.

**I failed, little Death-manque, I failed, once. Long, long ago. I let myself love and be loved. The Unmaker failed the same way, but she has disappointed me. Where I embrace pain and its nature....**

And she moved her right hand, the wounds seeming to bleed black blood as she smiled menacingly. **She shuns it. She found her way back. You are bored, little Death. You want a world to shake up your experiences.**

She then pressed herself more firmly against the smaller woman, whose shivers intensified as the memories of a reddish creature with four glowing eyes merged with that of a towering giant of primordial lava, and what had happened when the creature had ambushed her. The other Death froze slightly, a brief moment of shock and even regret crossing her eyes, and then her face hardened, and the light of her nine suns burned more brilliantly.

**You want novelty? So then shall it be. To quote your younger brother and my older one, the price of getting what you wanted is getting what you once wanted.**

With that her face leaned in and then a long tongue forked like a serpent extended outward and as it made contact with Death's face she made a whimper of disgust and shock as the creature sprang back, laughing with a sadistic relish.

**My projection is the hero, little Death. The angel that could not sustain the knowledge of what he was and that his father lied, reshaped as the immortal warrior, Death come among the Deathless. In time you shall meet, Unmaker and Endless. What then? What then shall there be of proud Death, who has endured and taken her power and her endurance for granted when it fails you, as it failed me?**

TITANS TOWER:

On the floor Death awoke and raised herself to her feet painfully, whimpering with the pain of her broken wing, seeing part of it literally almost shorn in two by the boot that had crunched on it. Her iridescent blood splintered, but then Death's face hardened. That thing had come in, barged its way in, and casually taken Raven.

 _ **What is it you crave for, God on the Gilded Throne,** _she murmured. **_Ah yes....you long for me and yet you can never have me._ **

Her eyes shone with a harder light and her white hair suddenly became darkness again and her wing healed with a sudden sharp crunch that even with her own rage coursing through her as a kind of adrenaline boost meant the rest of the heroes around her winced. As did the Jotnar.

 _ **Very well,**_ she murmured to herself. You shall have me, all right. _**And then you shall have nothing else again.**_ For a time she seemed to stare into space, steeling herself for what she was about to do. She had always been able to do this, but.......it was in her nature to love life, and to give it peace. Not this, not like this. And yet.....with everything else, with what had been made clear, it had taken the one who bound her, who part of her loved even with all else. Not because of the pleasure, exactly, but from someone who understood in a way only Karen Starr came close to matching what it was to live too long and to put up a front every day of going through the motions of a life that endured until one blessed day it would stop.

She needed this. Then she got up and with a strength that was fueled still further by her rage, strode toward the door, her face a mask of stone.

She would meet the monster that had pretended to be a friend to her, and she would _end_ it.   
  
THE FIRST LAZARUS PIT:

 _ **I was curious**_ , I admit, the Unmaker said with a soft bit of sarcasm in her voice. _**You came here, not so long ago, and sought to devour and absorb an entire portion of a set of multiverses for a rather larger meal than usual. You, the unstoppable undying flame, were repelled in spite of none of our kind being present. I had wondered if it was something special about this multiverse. Were the figures in their manifestations here greater than elsewhere in power or in virtue?** _

She shook her head.

 _ **No, they were not**_. Her eyes flashed with amusement. _**As it was, they didn't repel you, it was an Endless who did because she perceived exactly that you are a threat to her person. So you engineer a breakdown, you coerce her into yielding into that sadness my....other face...knew was there in the Hall. You make the one that outlives this universe angry at you, at least on the surface, and wield a ritual to bind her beyond that which is already there, hoping thus to achieve your true goal.** _

_**Ever since you fell, that day, when you realized that you were never the hero meant to slay the monster but that your quests built it, you have ever longed for the touch of death, to end your existence.** _

_**I am a monster, after all, my dear sister.**_ The Azar snarled. _**Even here, in one of my most benevolent manifestations I take humanity and I scour them of emotions vital to life and to living. I take a child and I turned her into a spear of unyielding iron aimed at her father, teaching her means of controlling her powers that anyone with a sufficiently strong will or enough brute force could suborn. And in others, I take this further and encourage her to go down a path where she destroys herself that from the ashes she would rise. In my truest self I am no less a viral force of ruin than the demon Trigon, as one of our father's foes takes his name here.**_

_**Why should I sustain my own existence? You are no less Death than she, grant me the boon of Ending!** _

_**In the end of this cycle, when the stars become wrong for the Urhalzantrani and that which the rise of Urhalzan is herald thereby takes its shape, you will have that boon. Not until then. Your fate and your focus is fixed within existence and the clashes of Entropy and Creation. If not you it would be another.** _

Heroes are supposed to slay monsters, the Azar snarled.

 _ **So we are, and in time, I shall. We are also bound by fate as you are. The elder of the two faces of the Soul and Messenger has written your decrees in fetters that I would dare not break. Even that which nothing exists that can harm it has limitations, elder sister. You were clever before, and it would have taken them much to realize your real goals. Somehow....** _she mused. Then her gaze turned to Raven.

_**Let the girl go, sister. She won't help your pursuit.** _

_**I did not claim her merely to relinquish her!** _At this shout her eyes followed the progression of her power and of its ivory and gold aspects, saw it reaching toward Raven and then her smile intensified further into a deranged grin punctuated by a low and tectonic rumble of pleasure. A sudden flash of lighting-smoke and reality ripped along its path but the infection stopped, a chasm opened between them.

_**Symbolic, that.** _

The Azar threw back her head and spread her arms wide and laughed, long and cold and cruelly, her twin voices adding to a pealing cacchination of eldritch thunder.

**_Of course she will. I have taken Death's woman. She will come for her, and then I will offer her the choice. A world of life eternal, or using the fullness of her power to end me, to save the woman she loves by killing her god._ **

The Unmaker smiled and then with a sudden motion the God on the Gilded Throne realized was telegraphed purely as a gesture of contempt moved, her fist colliding straight with the other woman's breastplate, and in the outskirts of the City of David, near the area that was known as the Pool of Siloam and which held a place that was within the spaces known to humanity and between them, a deep rumbling echoed. The Azar clashing with the New Gods in the Valley of Megiddo heard it and turned in shock only for a dual blast of the Alpha and Omega effects to hurl her on her face.

The ground burst open and a titan was hurled into the air with a roar of anger, the eruption of smoke and rubble causing the IDF to immediately react by trying to deploy forces as a gigantic thing strode out of the hole. She wore bright silver armor with an ankh of obsidian hue on her breastplate, light blue cape and loincloth standing as a clash with it in a way and yet an image reminiscent of aspects of a medieval knight in another. The IDF wanted to open fire and yet the sight of the giant looking at them with a face where nine suns burned with a brilliant hue meant they held their fire, even as she suddenly accelerated and they heard a sudden set of impacts that were heard more than seen, the sonic waves rippling out and shattering windows and even sensors on the tanks and armored vehicles. The sounds faded as the Lightdancer, unleashed in her fullness and enjoying herself immensely hurled her sister to the west, across the Mediterranean.

The God on the Gilded Throne paused in mid air, arms spread wide and leaned forward, her face beaten and battered, blood oozing from her jaw as she spat a tooth that was disintegrated with a blast. 

_**Come on then,** _she snarled, only to look up for a second as the skies flashed with a brilliant aura like a burning flame and the Lightdancer's smile intensified.

 _ **Your wish is my command**_.

With that she moved in a sudden impact that winded the God on the Gilded Throne and brought her falling headlong into the impact of the Libyan desert, far from the inhabited areas of civilization, Bedouin moving away the second the impending rush of the creatures echoed with sound. She fell with an impact even as the burning skies that brought terrible visions with them consolidated into a giant in bright golden armor at the Lightdancer's side.

She snarled, from broken jaws and made curses muffled by the damage done to her face.

The Lightdancer nodded with an executioner's look and then the Fateful Lightning turned, her face Urhalzantrani, in a sense, the ceratopsid frill gleaming in a hue that matched her fangs, but her face was that of dark magma interspersed with streaks of bright red fire and her sword erupted into a brilliant flame before moving straight for the monster's breastplate with a single overpowering stab.

The flash of light in the Libyan desert was mistaken for a nuclear explosion by multiple authorities and yet there was a strangeness. Two footprints, like claws sheathed in metal burned into a glass-like pattern that nothing of mere strength could move. And a great golden heath where golden winds blew, and monsters would begin to rise murmuring and snarling:

_**All hail the God on the Gilded Throne.** _

Only the Fateful Lightning had seen the look of peace and contentment in the eyes of the God on the Gilded Throne, the moment where she who had been Black Alice had last looked on the word, and had seen her lips mouthing two words in English:

"Do it."

After it was done, the Lightdancer returned to the Lazarus Pit near the Pool of Siloam, a place where Death of the Endless had bestowed a gift of life and healing to eradicate some of her issues at a point in her eternal lifespan like where she was now, and yet....

Raven was hurt, the impact had crushed most of her bones and her naturally pale face was near the hue of the Unmaker's own. Her armor vanished and she wore a deel dark as her hair, minus the blue streaks that marked it as stripes. Her skin changed to that of her human face, a very dark brown, the darkest that melanin could naturally support, and she knelt beside the pale demoness, and spoke a few words of power, watching as the bones healed and exorcising the infection that exuded from Raven's mouth in a golden mist that a small whisp of lightning-smoke ensured would never again be.

Raven took a wrenching gasp and then heard a voice, soft and yet steel-like speaking in a tone she knew as deceptively human as two eyes blazed like suns and in them was a beauty that was fa-

_**Sleep.** _

Darkness took her again.

MEGIDDO:

The clash that followed moved at a speed that only one of the Endless or the Urhalzantrani could have charted. Izaya and Uxas commanding the fullness of their power, the Alpha and Omega Effects warring and burning outward, rays tearing into the armor-flesh of the titan before them, whose voice rasped with the same power as the muscles within her form. Her strength was unbound, not reliant on a tether that had learned to resist her and even now found herself drawn into the rise of Project Cadmus, which was sowing the dragon's teeth to raise mighty forces that were no more controllable to this one.

Alpha and Omega Effects collided with her and yet she bulled through them. Time and space slowed down around her, and yet to a being who had devoured not one universe but thousands and tens of thousands, this was nothing. The waves of light all the same did require strength to bull through but that she had. They were the mightiest beings short of the Endless or the sons of Yahweh, and their power against a being that found a multiverse a meal was enough that she could not lightly dismiss them, her snarling voice rasping along with her muscles with each step, metal flowing into the shape of a massive warhammer in her right hand.

_**You seek to wield against me Alpha and Omega.** _

She laughed, in a cold and terrible laugh that echoed with eight peals where others would have had but four. 

**_I_ am _the Alpha and the Omega,_**

**_the end and the death and the beginning and life._ **

**_Mine the hands that set the stars to burn,_ **

**_that found a world of ashes and left it ivory and gold._ **

Her hammer slammed into the ground and the impact caused the New Gods to move in a mutual swiftness well-honed against each other and working just as well together.

_**My hunger is eternal, and it works in levels and on scales even you, children of an endless war, cannot fathom.** _

Her gaze turned to Uxas, whose powers of slowing time sought to weigh down her arms as she hefted her hammer, and then she whirled and hurled it straight at him, the head slamming into him with a force much greater than that which had taken down the demon, as Uxas was hurled on his back, the hammer going into her hands.

 _ **I hunger for simple things. Eternity and deathlessness in the one hand,**_ as her hammer briefly dropped and she held up her right hand, and then her left was held up in the same fashion, palm up, gauntlets slightly clenched. _ **And longing for death while being unable to die on the other. So is it that I remake all that I conquer, in my image, and in my likeness.** _

_**You proclaim yourselves Gods, children of the Fourth World. To you, I am the Fifth World, and the Fifth Sun, and the thing that the Nahua feared and kept at bay by thousands of dripping hearts.** _

Uxas grasped the hammer as she dropped it and with a sudden skillful motion slammed it against her side as she whirled, her eyes flashing, and then the Alpha Effect channeling ever greater powers of the Source slammed into her, from the other, her hands clasped in front of her in an X-position as she braced herself to withstand these effects. Her sister the Unmaker would have finished this by now, for she was undamageable, no power could strike her and no force wound her or lay her low. That was life as the Unmaker lived it, no doubt a thing of loneliness ad of detachment. She was not so lucky nor so fortunate. Though she was mighty and commanded countless universes, she could be hurt, she could bleed, her bones could crack.

And against the twin weights of Darkseid and Highfather the fullness of their power was rewarded by a set of snaps and a groan of pain as the giant fell to her knees and then her eyes flashed not with dead starlight but bright blue flames, her hammer in her hands again as the broken bones healed and she snarled. She moved with speed, her hammer smashing the New Gods apart and yet the New Gods moved in turn with a swiftness just slightly slower than her own, faster than any Kryptonian, even faster than the Speed Force.

The clash was one that echoed like thunder and in this clash of Gods there was a tremendous force that made the world hold its breath, the New Gods struck blows that would have slain lesser beings and taking them unharmed, the Alpha and Omega effects shattering bones and yet each time the God on the Gilded Throne became angrier, and her presence such that lucidity began to painfully claw its way back into her mind.

Then the eruption of the impact ninety miles south caused her to turn and the Alpha and Omega blasts hurled her forward on her face, her hammer hurled from her grasp as she fell forward, before grasping the ground with arms and a body that shifted elements of its shape. She raised herself to her knees first, her body shifting first to one dark green with a second spectral head to match, her face now crowned by a vast frill akin to that of a Styracosaur, her teeth snarling with a low grinding sound as they gritted against each other.

She let this transformation work further and raised herself to her feet again, clad in a shape like a bipedal two-headed dragon, clad in armor like stone, eyes that shone with blue star-flame burning from her face, and both heads roared with a sound like murdered suns.

On the dragon's breastplate there was an image of two faces, one dinosaurian and one human, the human lower and sorrowful, the dinosaurian one swaggering.

The creature's hands crackled with energy and then hurled discs outward. The Alpha and Omega effects dispelled them, but from there the clash became more of a defensive one, the monster striding forward, pushing the New Gods from the Valley, and then her gaze turned upward.

At last, as the Sun reached a specific point in the day, it would be possible. Nekron had dropped his guard from the abduction of his sister. It was time.

In a brilliant flash of Unlight she vanished, leaving kaleidoscopic afterimages and a brief snarling voice that growled:

**_Cares not from whence the blood flows, only that it flows...._ **

THE CITADEL OF AZARATH, THRONEWORLD OF THE AZARATH-EMPIRE:

On the Gilded Throne the entity that had been born of mortal flesh blinked her eyes. An avatar destroyed, but summoned to her, and giving her the fullness of what was known. Her gaze looked, the screaming internal nature of the woman who had been Black Alice visible.

_**Well done, good and faithful servant. The hour draws nigh, and Death shall either save her existence and choose servitude to a greater force than a demoness, or I shall at last be no more and the torments of Azarath shall cease.** _

She leaned forward.

_**Of course if I continue to exist......** _

Her eyes blinked and the Avatar was now a mortal-seeming woman with black hair and dark eyes, wearing a pleated skirt and a midriff-exposing top with sleeves that went down to her elbows. Black Alice looked around.

"How?"

_**I am this realm, and I am God in it. If you have disappointed me in granting me my truest desire, do not think that being absorbed here will make your fate less....unpleasant.** _

She found herself suddenly on a world that was an Earth but it could not be Earth, for all was silence and yet noise. The buildings gilded with ivory and the people ageless and moving with a power that defied anything she knew. Then a crowd of them froze and moved in synchronized fashion and they and all around them spoke in a singular echo of dual voices:

_**You are in a place where you can never die, and where God decrees that the most hallowed dreams be fulfilled.** _

Then as she looked around and thought for a moment, impossibly, that she was in Dayton, her mother turning toward her, her mother then smiled and her smile was the reptilian one of the thing on the throne.

_**All are one in the Azar.....** _

REALM OF NEKRON:

It was a realm dark and bitter and lonely, of the Nothingness before Life, before the Endless who governed both assumed her position. In the time when he and his twin sister had been one entity, not arch-enemies whose nature as a divided thing made them each determined most to end the blight of their own existence.

There was Nothingness here, save him, in its truest sense, and in that Nothingness he brooded on what was and wasn't a throne.

Then he froze. In Nothingness there was something, and it pulsed with ivory and gold and he felt something that was neither dead nor living, ever-hungry and driven by a deep frenzy. And for all that the steps were continual, brutish. Level. Smooth. A giant in armor strode toward him with a vast warhammer strapped to her back, eyes glowing with murdered stars, and in that thing neither dead nor living, she heard a voice speaking to him coldly.

_**Your sister sleeps in the place where I have drawn together the things of ritual. Now you will join her, Nekron, son of Death.** _

_**And then from there, I shall have but one thing more to seek, and reality shall hinge on a choice. What will your mother do? Become life everlasting, or kill an unkillable force, bound by a weight superior to that of her own command feather? Or perhaps....** _

Her voice was gloating. 

_**I could always use a new high priestess.....** _

TITANS TOWER:

Death strode out of the Tower, a look of determination upon her face, when they all saw a flash of light that had reminded them of the kind of power wielded by Apokolips or New Genesis. Yet it was brighter, a super-star next to a dwarf star. Death froze and the rage that had given her an adrenaline boost held her in tension that led to a sudden motion swifter than anything save perhaps the Speed Force (and even then she had her form as the Black Flash for that). She found her love in the arms of a woman, skin matching the very darkest-skinned people of the Sudan, save that her hair was long and unnaturally straight, in a way no truly human hair was. It was darker than her skin and marked with blue tiger-stripes, her eyes glowing like suns.

Death remembered the words the monster in the Timeless Halls had spoken to her, and then she looked at the Unmaker more closely, as the woman spoke: 

_**She lives. The Aesir have been seen off, and the iron wheel of destiny makes its great turn. My errant sister has loosed the eldest brother of the Endless from his fetters and the ways of Existence shall tremble at a reminder that Fate in all her forms is greater than any God, Gilded Throne or no.** _

Death froze then.

_**Destiny isn't bound to his book?** _

_**My dear, he has not been since she sought to lay claim to to this portion of the multiverse via that tether of hers. Your brother has set in motion events to repair the Wall in a fashion that it shall not be broken again, not as it was here.** _

Her gaze turned to the stars as she set Raven down, gently, and then did not really care to look as Death moved to her and held her, her gaze sharp.

_**Why are you here, then? Here to end it all?** _

The hope in her voice was painful, but the wish to see her first family and to join them wherever they lay flowered for a moment. But so did the awareness of how far she was being pushed, of the temptation to indulge in what she had never done before even though she had nothing to stop her if she wished. With it warred her binding, that which had grown in spite of it, and the menacing presence of the thing that plotted yet another murder of one she loved, and she wept bitter tears, indecision paralyzing her in a way she could not truly grasp nor deal with simply, her hands firmly around a Raven who slowly began to wake.

_**No, not that. Here to ensure my sisters gamble fails, that you are freed....** _

And then her smile suddenly was that of the being she met in those Halls and Death froze again, her body moving from indecision to tension.

And to fulfill that old promise. _**The Unmaker and the Endless have met, in the form of the invincible Hero-shape that she takes to be.....less herself, and more what she believes mortals need. You have seen the deeper truths, and that reality of which here you are the mirror. Is she wrong?** _

Death shook her head, as the Unmaker's eyes turned from there to the just-arrived Titans, her smirk one of genuine amusement that faded when she saw Surtr, King of Muspelheim, and faded altogether when it latched on Yeneli, who was clad in her own armor, her hand on the hilt of a blade.

_**Interesting. The slayer of Despair, the.....the first Despair, unleashed. My dear sister.** _

She shook her head. _**Such a foolish one, that. She unleashes powerful monsters and never bothers to remember to only do this if she could control them.** _

Her voice was dry as she continued. _**If** **I had not come here, that one would have done her level best to add one of the Deathless to one of the Endless in her list of monsters slain. She might well have even slain the Avatar but in so doing she would have drawn her eyes to your world once more, not to absorb it but to simply annihilate them.**_

Her eyes turned to the Endless. _**Even then, little Endless, you would not die. You would find yourself in Azarath, a toy and a thing of torment, of a nature unimaginable to those whose vision is bounded by the limitations of Christianity or Islam on such matters.**_

_**So it is good I did come here, then.** _

Yeneli strode to her, determined, and laid her hand on the giant's gorget, as she raised herself to chest height and sought to draw her down to face her.

_**That demoness is mine to kill, creature! None o-** _

Her hand caught on the gorget and no amount of pulling did more than crack the ground under her, as the Urhalzantrani stood, unmoved, her eyes flashing more brightly.

A second flash of brilliant flame burned behind them and she heard a voice coughing, and she whirled around to see a human as dark-skinned as the other save that her hair was a brilliant reddish hue to match her eyes, and her armor was a brilliant gold-like hue.

**You can't hurt her but all the same, get your hands off my woman.**

_**Or what?** _Snarled Yeneli.

The fist that collided into her face and laid her low was something she only felt, and shadows rose up to claim her.

"Damn," whistled Gar Logan. "And I thought what Batman did to Guy Gardner was impressive."

The Fateful Lightning simply turned to the Unmaker.

_**I handled the Greater Daemon in Japan. It will never rise again. I hope Zee doesn't regret not getting to kill that one, given the....family history.** _

The Unmaker shrugged.

Her gaze remained at the stars and then the Fateful Lightning's followed them and she blinked, understanding immediately. The starlight was shifting its nature and its hue, becoming the hungry dead starlight of Azarath again. Not the prelude to another manifestation, precisely. More.......her human-face's nose wrinkled with distaste, her lips curling into an aristocratic sneer as her fists clenched within her gauntlets.

**That one doesn't know when to quit, does she?**

The Unmaker shook her head.

 _ **No, she doesn't,** _her voice soft.

_**Soon she shall gather the last two things of her rite, and then we shall see.** _

The heroes quietly took the moment to take Raven and all of them, even Surtr, making a point to leave the unconscious slayer of Despair where the punch had laid her low.

**See what?**

_**If they win, and if they drive her back, or if they fail.** _

**And if they do?**

The Unmaker's smile was savage, an Odinic grin of battle-joy.

_**Then there will be nothing left of this corner of reality save one person, the shards of the other six drawn to other parts of existence.** _

The Fateful Lightning nodded.

**So should I get popcorn or.....?**


	15. Secrets and Lies:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gar Logan asks a few questions. 
> 
> Death and Raven reconnect.

TITANS TOWER, MEETING ROOM:

Raven, Starfire, and Death had vanished, stealing into her room in shadows and a quiet motion of Death's that left disquieting elements about her nature, what it was, what it meant, and how it meant it. 

The two newest guests were met with no small amount of awkwardness, especially the one in golden armor with hair that seemed to have that brilliant unnatural reddish hue like starlight reshaped into something like long, flowing locks. Her eyes were red, as red as those of Surtr's and Yeneli's, and there was a distinct kinship if simultaneously seeming of a greater scale and a greater brutishness. Her presence had boiled water in the meeting room, creating small clouds of steam and yelps of pain, and it had melted a few electronics in her path, which she shrugged about. It would also leave scorch marks in the Titans' couch that would take a long time to move, which she was still less apologetic about.

She was abnormal, but encounters with the other beings of Muspelheim as they knew it meant the abnormalities were the same effects but exaggerated further. To her right, the other one that seemed to almost cuddle with her, with skin as dark as melanin allowed, hair with blue tiger stripes within dark black hair and eyes that burned like glowing golden Suns (and there the memories of when Death's eyes had briefly taken on that same coloring took on a new meaning for the Titans who witnessed it, one of fear and foreboding) looked around with a face impassive or marked with a cold, seemingly arrogant smirk. 

All the Titans were on a greater edge than usual, the clash with the Aesir and the ease with which they, a team that had faced down some of the mightiest beings in their multiverse and beings from another and won, had been smacked down with relatively little difficulty exacerbated that. Only Garfield Logan, whose green body and pointed elf-like ears marked his own atypical traits, remained calm. He had seen still stranger things than the raving thing that called itself Azar, or a Black woman who teleported in from who knows where, bringing Raven back and healed.

He had seen it, and yet.....

He went over to them, staying more to the side of the one on the right than the being whose presence on the left had raised the temperature of the room enough that (oh dearie dear) the women and even the men were in scantier clothes than usual, fanning themselves. For his own part he wore an undershirt and boxers, a concession to guests. Gar was in many ways the one of the team most comfortable with nudity and seeing the least sexuality in it, something that stood him in good here.

The two entities turned their gazes to him. Two eyes like burning red pools of lava and nine like suns, a hypnotic power that was more potent than anything Mad Mod or the Puppet King had ever devised. He stared blankly, drool dripping from his lower jaw before closing his eyes and forcefully shaking his head. 

"OK, I want to know."

To his surprise his question was asked in a firm, clear voice even as the rest of the Titans jolted and moved in a cringing posture, a few of them quietly looking up morticians and still more quietly making sure nobody messed with Gar's stuff as heroes never did seem to truly die, though with Death's evident distaste for Garfield Logan their protection might hold less true for him. The two entities gazed dispassionately, the one on the left raising a molten eyebrow as he took a deep breath and continued.

"I have seen some shit in the Doom Patrol. Everything that happened with the crazy bitch in the green armor wasn't anything too odd by my standards. I even met Raven's girlfriend before any of the rest of us did during that, something with Ambush Bug. Hell of a guy, Ambush Bug."

The one on the left leaned forward slightly, an aura of impatience evident.

"I get where she fits in with all this. Your bog-standard conquering archetype with a crush on death. Thanos if prettier, not that this is hard and not that she's any great bargain herself."

He looked at them.

"I kind of get where scary fire demon presumably still conked out from that Guy Gardner punch is, too. Death's ex, brought out of some interdimensional Rick Sanchez bullshit by the aforementioned blonde blue eyed Thanos from another part of....everything."

He steepled his hands and coughed, the heat of the other being's presence starting to affect his breathing, his words wheezing until she dialed back her heat somewhat.

"But why-" he coughed for nearly a minute until the heat's effects lessened after a slight flick on the ear from the other one. "Why the fuck are you two here? What are you, even? Like the Men in Black but for cuckoo for coco puffs things that claim to be gods from our world? Where were you guys when Trigon tried to take over the world? Or whenever Darkseid tries to set up his new beach house in Metropolis?"

A sharp bark of laughter from the one on the right, the one with the nine sun-eyes echoed. He winced, his hearing ringing with the effect.

_**We are not from your corner of existence to begin with, Mr. Logan. You and all universes like yours fit into a specific context, an entire portion of the multiverse. One of many seen as 'fictive' for it arises from the narrative imaginations and conventions of writers. In truth all universes are fictive in the eyes of another, even those that see themselves as reality exist at multiple levels of interpretation in the stories of still broader universes. There are beings that exist beyond these continuua where reality and fiction alike are things we may intrude into and reshape at our whims.** _

_**We know all things, in Heaven and in Hell, above the Earth and under it.** _

_**To us, your entire fifty one worlds are as meaningful as an ant to a being of the Fourth World. To most of us, it will always remain so. When that Wall is fully restored, most of us cannot come into contact with you, only my sister Arazakanu, whose function relies on suborning and subverting boundaries, or in another sense, upon awareness of the Deep Truth and weaponizing it for the sake of her own amusements, could make that contact. And to you she would be a somewhat more....murderous...version of the Fifth** **Dimensional Imps. In truth to you that is what she is and what she would be.**_

_**We operate on the scale where the thing at play is your multiverse, any one given Earth is as nothing to us, or less than nothing, for our very scale is that of Existence itself at much higher levels, beyond Oblivion and Death, the twins who mark the end of each cycle and depart together and go their separate ways and are the first to meet again when reality renews here.** _

_**My sister, she whom you call Thanos but prettier, in this sense is a cosmic virus, whatever she seeks to infect, she will make her best effort to do so. Even a fuller effort to halt her cannot stop her everywhere. She has not brought reality to the end of this cycle because most of the time she is a relatively mindless force infecting and seeking battle as an instinctual reminder both of what she used to be and what we of the Urhalzantrani are meant to be. We are the children of the Kelzhandar Oath, of the Field of Corpses. Battle is in our blood, we are Temujin and Ogedei given cosmic power, but retaining much the same instincts but no control nor limitation in exercising them.** _

_**You repelled an invasion of hers in one of her rare moments of lucidity, and now that one of the Seven in your world has restored her mindless low-attention-span norm, she will forget your corner existed and perhaps see it akin to how a child learns to see flame when they burn their hand on a stove.** _

_**That is who she truly is, Mr. Logan. She doesn't care a damn for you or for your team or for anything on your world. The infection in Gotham, the golden heath in the Mashreq, these are minor details. Her goal is nothing less than the transformation of your universe. And in this sense, I am the antibody to that virus. I am called the Unmaker in the Al-Azif, the Lightdancer, the Hammer of Doom.** _

_**Where I walk on my own I leave worlds better than when I depart.** _

Then she leaned forward with her dark face illuminated by the golden suns.

_**Where I am brought to battle much of the time there is nothing left of an individual planet or even a multiverse but ashes and none left to tell the tale of how. I operate on the scale of the infinite totality of existence, so such less than a minor loss of a single hair upon one's head.** _

The creature, for creature she was, smiled and her smile was the brilliant white serrated fangs that were too long and too deeply set for a truly human jaw or jawline.

_**I am here to weigh your multiverse after the repelling of that prior assault. If you are weighed and found worthy, I shall depart and all that was here shall seem as if a strange encounter in the realm of Dream of the Endless. If not, then the verdict shall be "Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin,"** _

The Titans, save Donna, even Cassie jolted at that reference, all of them recognizing it and what it meant.

"I thought the Spectre was the Wrath of God," squeaked Bart Allen.

Her nine eyes turned to him.

_**In your universe he is. In the broader contours of existence, I AM. Where Deborah bat Omri walks, judgment falls, and if necessary a purging and cleansing of the unworthy. Such has it ever been, so ever shall it be.** _

_**And you are wrong, incidentally, on the idea of both the Jotunness who remains unconscious and shall awaken after I finish this warning to you, children of this Tower. She is not in truth a conventional force of your world either. A being that absorbs multiverses for a meal awoke her, if she were to turn her full focus on her, she would obliterate her with little difficulty. She has awoken a being that very few among you have the true tools to control, and of them one of them is soon to depart your universe for another, there to try to connect with another version of Kara Zor-El and lay her own demons to rest.** _

She shook her head _ **. It won't work but you can't fault her for trying.** _

Her smile remained cold and for the first time they grasped the family resemblance between the Unmaker and the God on the Gilded Throne in the nature of that grin. 

_**Soon, she shall decide that it is time that she strike, and then your universe shall hinge on a choice. What will Death of the Endless do? There is quite literally nothing you can do here, you are drawn into the manipulations of her older brother, who engineered her slavery to a kind master and removed the master's own choice in deciding that one way or the other. She does not understand that, yet.** _

_**When she does.....** _

Her grin became still more akin to that of her older sister's.

 _ **Well,**_ she reclined back and now unapologetically cuddled the Jotunness whose hand slid down her waist, hovering just above her hip.

_**Reality is going to have a splendid time at that point.** _

RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

Raven found herself fully awake and held by Death whose embrace was one far stronger than she had ever considered. Death's wing, the one she had not damaged, showed signs of recent healing and both Death and Starfire were near her, their eyes meeting hers with worry.

"I'm glad you are alive, friend Rachel," Starfire murmured and their hands met, and it was echoed by Death's quiet whispering the same into Raven's ear, holding onto her.

 _ **I almost slipped into.....**_ she stopped.

_**This is foolish, but no moreso than the rest.** _

With that Raven soon found herself and Starfire as nude as Death herself, the look in her eyes less that of arousal and more that of desperation, of someone haunted by a spectre of loss and the idea that if things were not taken in this way that they might never be so again. The kiss this time was forceful, Death taking the initiative with both of them, demonstrating a casual strength that left Raven uncertain if she had ever truly bound the eldest sister of the Seven or if there was some higher force that had intervened and manipulated things as it willed and left her an impression that seemed true. Raven herself was mightier than she seemed in physical terms, able to be an equal to the Amazons, even Diana the monster-slayer, and they in turn were physical equals to a Kryptonian, though they lacked several of the other elements that were the true advantage. In the way that Death kissed her and then Starfire while keeping one of her arms around Raven's shoulder, she grasped a nature of a strength that was that of a concept, and what had been a thing of amusement or goading her to greater feats became a thing of awe leavened with dread.

Death's kisses were ferocious and then the two heroes were on their bed, their hands clasped, as Death moved with a speed that marked her lips on Raven's body and her hand slipping into Starfire's. The speed that moved was equal to that of the Speed Force and it was a thing that was more nearly sacred than carnal, Raven feeling charged with life at every corner of her being in a way she had never imagined, her body become stiff with pleasure, mouth locked in a silent scream. Starfire's eyes were closed where hers were open and had gone from two to four, and yet the same desperation that pervaded this meant that it was the strangest thing that had happened to them.

It took them little time to reach their peak, and when it started it did not stop until it crossed to the straddling lines between pleasure and pain, their bodies shaped and reworked by a force of unimaginable strength.

In fifteen minutes, Death had given them more pleasure than they had experienced in the years prior, and a glimpse of a deeper reality behind what they had taken to be true.

She stood up, and walked over to the feather on the wall and stared at it with a look of sorrow, willing herself dressed, as Raven and Starfire laid on the bed, staring into space, their bodies sore and yet filled with a pleasurable heat that dwarfed anything they had imagined or could ever have imagined. Eventually, slowly, they slouched to Raven's shower and shared one that was, for a change, just a shower, for most that came after such a thing as they had experienced would be less so.

When they stepped out of the shower Raven fell to her knees for a moment even as she began to loose the locks on the command feather. Reality was trembling and stretching and there was a mystical feeling akin to that of a low-pressure region in weather, the kind before a tornado breaks. The wards on the command feather were weakened enough that it would become a simple matter of wi-

CITADEL OF TEMPLE AZARATH:

 _ **Now,**_ spoke the God on the Gilded Throne, and at that moment she departed from the Gilded Throne in the temple, the seat from which her priestess had observed events on Earth and other worlds and long, long ago argued that a half-demon child of the demon Trigon deserved a home and a place to be. In that acrid light that crackled like electricity she strode, crossing between dimensions less like crossing streets and more like the bow shock of a volcanic eruption. Reality peeled away before her and it welcomed its new conqueror like a blade slipping into water.

TITANS ISLAND:

Yeneli's eyes snapped open, she felt the reality of her multiverse having a sudden moment of pressure like the point before the onset of a tornado, raising herself up and healing herself of remaining damage via a spell that was not quite casual but offered her a boost of everything she needed. She drew her blade from her side, hovering by Titans Tower's right shape of the T, fire rippling up it. As she stood, she briefly held the blade in suspended animation when the room in front of her hovering body erupted outward and the presence of cosmic malevolence that had intensified left her holding a badly damaged Koriand'r of Tamaran, eyes that gleamed like dead stars smiling at her with a casual contempt.

TITANS TOWER, RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

It was not long after their pleasures had ceased and Death and Raven and Starfire had followed the nature of cleaning themselves up after, including showers for the latter two that the distorted eerie sound of a portal opened with bright green crackling energy and a foul odor followed. From it strode the giant, the one who had gone from lucid and malevolent to an uncontrolled and willful virus with eyes that gleamed like dead stars. She turned her head slowly and deliberately to Raven and told her:

_**I do not suffer witches to escape me, not so easily, and not by the aid of others.** _

Koriand'r of Tamaran hurled herself forward with a set of starbolts and shouts worthy of one trained by the warlords of Okaara. The starbolts impacted against the armor without any visible impact and the creature eventually snorted in disgust and then with a motion faster than anything Koriand'r could understand a blow struck her with enough force she felt her body almost flattened by the impact, landing against a being clad in armor of archaic Muspel-make, and from that being flowed words in a harsh and guttural language. She felt her body reshaping itself painfully as the being took her sword and shouted a name in desperation, hurling herself in the room.

She had just enough time to hear the pained scream of Death and a howl from Raven's mouth of eerie nature that underscored that benevolent or not, the kindred of Trigon the Terrible were just that, kindred, and then the odor intensified and vanished. The wards that veiled the command feather erupted in a sudden flash of light and silence, her vision hovering in a blurry state between waking and unconsciousness. The Titans found her then, the incident occurring faster than they could respond. She heard the ground trembling under the footsteps of armored boots and nine sun-eyes looked to her and the painful healing became much smoother, and only she (and the Fateful Lightning) heard the words that slipped from the alien being's mouth.

_**Now comes the day and the hour of judgment.** _

GARDEN OF THE FORKING WAYS:

In his garden Destiny paused.

He saw the proliferation of other versions of himself, at first, and then with a conscious will he suddenly focused and honed that perception and then there was only one of him. A cold smile crossed his lips.

 **It is time,** he spoke, as the moment on Earth-48 occurred, and the plans he had drawn up for all that had gone before began to unfold in fullness. An eyeless face gazed with omniscience, and reality trembled as the very embodiment of harsh Fate asserted his will, unbound and released from the fetters that had sought to control him.


	16. Because I could not stop for Death:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Ritual of the Seven is unleashed.

CITADEL OF THE TEMPLE AZARATH:

Raven and Yeneli found themselves stuck, along with Death, in different areas. Yeneli found herself anchored in full as one of seven objects on a ritual field, bound within a circle.

 _This is Azarath,_ Raven's voice was horrified.

_What have you done to my **home**?! _

The titanic figure on the gilded skull throne that had replaced Azar's old command throne raised her hands, gauntlets pointing upward. 

_**I have reshaped it into the truth that underlaid the lies, little daughter of Trigon. Did you truly think it was coincidence that the only begotten daughter of the demon was brought to a citadel of his enemies? That you were taught a means of self-destruction, either by my hand or by his? You were never Azarath's guest, you were its spear of unyielding iron, a being brought forth for the purpose of annihilating that which spawned you. You were always a weapon, a thing of pacifism meant to slay abominations, much like the golem of Themyscira.** _

_**And now here, little daughter of the demon, behold the true Azarath that your goddess worshiped.** _

Raven looked around, the old Azarath, the wondrous peaceful paradise had been reshaped and rewoven, a realm of ivory and gold where the light was dead, where beauty concealed things of stark treachery, and where dreams were fulfilled but defiled and reshaped as torment, longing for death but unable to die. She grasped instinctively that here, everything was the being on the Gilded Throne and she was it, and that only the things in the ritual center, herself, and Death were given (temporary) exemptions from this. The most horrifying thing that she grasped was that this was but the way she was taught on a grander scale. Life purged of its own malice and hate, given eternal peace and youth and beauty, but a thing where Goddess existed and her presence was indisputable and not a matter of faith. And where her eye inflicted her own demons upon her creation and loosed them as monsters.

She snarled.

_You have defiled something great and made it a sewer._

The thing raised herself from the Gilded Throne and levitated downward.

She raised her hands further and began to incant in a language that was not human nor of Earth's nature. It was agglutinative and harsh and guttural, and even with her knowledge given her by Malchior Raven recognized only the tongue, though she was too wise to have dared the risk of using it as one of the kinds of Enuncia known, nor that of Enochian. The incantation was powerful, and as the first of the objects began to see a brilliant white light crackling like electricty through her, Yeneli raised her head back and roared in pain and agony, the very essence of her being wielded as a powerful weapon. She had enough presence of mind to throw her sword to Raven, who caught it and held in her hand the command feather with a look of sudden dawning understanding.

The second of the objects began to crackle as a new portion of the incantation began, and Perpetua awakened and unleashed an unearthly scream as her essence flowed into and intersected with that of the heart of Death. The daughter of the Primordial Multiverse found herself frozen and become a being of the elemental fury of the living storm, her essence and mind lost to her for a dreadful moment within moments. The lighning wound its way next to the Life Entity, who awoke and writhed with her mouth locked open in a silent scream, trying to thrash and all she could unleash were trembles and smaller motions as her body seemed to go further into the essence of the Ritual than what had gone before. The power built and built and built, Raven's nose bleeding from the weight and Death gazing in horror as her motions seemed to slow, the entity that looked at her looking with a sneer and a frown of cold command.

The ritual continued its march onward, Death feeling a sudden sharp cut above her left breast as blood was drawn from it to the last portion of the circle, and Nekron found himself in a rictus-grin worthy of the Joker, his essence and form reweaving itself briefly into unity with the life-entity as both had been in the days before Death had left her function and interwoven this into the nature of their very being. For a moment the Son and Daughter of Death and Life were one again and that entity stared in uncomprehending horror, recognizing that it was both one being and two beings interlocked within a dreadful ritual.

The blood of Death froze into a shape that made Death freeze. Her true face, that which hid behind her human gaze, the essence of the divider of what had gone before from what came after, and it too formed a part of the interlocked circle of six items. Her eyes were drawn to the seventh item and she felt nauseous and violated to see her original ankh, the first thing she had made with her own hands caught within the dreadful powers called up by the abomination from beyond the stars. With the last set of words:

 _ **Eieureun Neraii** _"Such has it ever been, so ever shall it be!" The power was fully unleashed and Death of the Endless felt for the first time what it was to be mastered by something truly greater and more powerful than she herself was.

Then the entity that looked at her with a lascivious grin spoke:

_**Now life and death are mine to bestow where I will. See, father? See, Turugamvirakil of the Field of Corpses? Even in madness I remain bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh! Now come to me, my good and faithful servant!** _

Death moved at the Azar's will with leaden steps, body jerking in an unnaturally stiff set of motions.

The circle gleamed with monstrous power and before it the Citadel that had been reshaped retook at points of her motions the imagery and iconography of the beautiful Azarath Raven had known in her youth and that recognition gave her the courage for what came next.

The sword in her left hand, the command feather in her right.

She spoke a sudden name in the true-tongue that could bind the only one of the Endless with a true-name that could be bound thus, and Death froze, caught between two fires, and the very sword that killed her sister and had almost killed her erupted into fire at the will not of its maker but of Raven, who found herself entranced by its splendid power and the Azar's face suddenly turned to her in indecision and then dawning horror. With a loud repetition twice more of the true name, Raven hurled up the command feather and before the Azar could reach her, the rival bindings caused her to miss a step, and for a moment they all beheld a towering figure with an eyeless face and a dark brown hood that was monastic in its severity and he nodded as the sword struck the feather and then all was light and a totality of everything and of nothing, of being and of non-being.


End file.
